Profit-Maximized Collaborative Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation in Distributed Cloud and Edge Computing Systems

Edge computing is a new architecture to provide computing, storage, and networking resources for achieving the Internet of Things. It brings computation to the network edge in close proximity to users. However, nodes in the edge have limited energy and resources. Completely running tasks in the edge may cause poor performance. Cloud data centers (CDCs) have rich resources for executing tasks, but they are located in places far away from users. CDCs lead to long transmission delays and large financial costs for utilizing resources. Therefore, it is essential to smartly offload users’ tasks between a CDC layer and an edge computing layer. This work proposes a cloud and edge computing system, which has a terminal layer, edge computing layer, and CDC layer. Based on it, this work designs a profit-maximized collaborative computation offloading and resource allocation algorithm to maximize the profit of systems and guarantee that response time limits of tasks are strictly met. In each time slot, this work jointly considers CPU, memory, and bandwidth resources, load balance of all heterogeneous nodes in the edge layer, maximum amount of energy, maximum number of servers, and task queue stability in the CDC layer. Considering the abovementioned factors, a single-objective constrained optimization problem is formulated and solved by a proposed simulated-annealing-based migrating birds optimization procedure to obtain a close-to-optimal solution. The proposed method achieves joint optimization of computation offloading between CDC and edge, and resource allocation in CDC. Realistic data-based simulation results demonstrate that it realizes higher profit than its peers. Note to Practitioners—This work considers the joint optimization of computation offloading between Cloud data center (CDC) and edge computing layers, and resource allocation in CDC. It is important to maximize the profit of distributed cloud and edge computing systems by optimally scheduling all tasks between them given user-specific response time limits of tasks. It is challenging to execute them in nodes in the edge computing layer because their computation resources and battery capacities are often constrained and heterogeneous. Current offloading methods fail to jointly optimize computation offloading and resource allocation for nodes in the edge and servers in CDC. They are insufficient and coarse-grained to schedule arriving tasks. In this work, a novel algorithm is proposed to maximize the profit of distributed cloud and edge computing systems while meeting response time limits of tasks. It explicitly specifies the task service rate and the selected node for each task in each time slot by considering resource limits, load balance requirement, and processing capacities of nodes in the edge, and server and energy constraints in CDC. Real-life data-driven simulations show that the proposed method realizes a larger profit than several typical offloading strategies. It can be readily implemented and incorporated into large-scale industrial computing systems.