Discrete-Time Joint Scheduling of Uploading and Computation for Deterministic MEC Systems Allowing for Task Interruptions and Insertions

In this letter, we study the user packet scheduling problem for deterministic mobile edge computing (MEC) systems aiming at minimizing the overall system task completion time. To reduce the time cost, we introduce three settings: multiple users are allowed to upload and compute simultaneously, tasks can be interrupted or continued at any time, and the uploading and computation phases are jointly scheduled. Under these settings, we formulate the scheduling problem as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem and present an exact branch-and-bound (BnB) solution approach. However, the BnB algorithm has high computational complexity, so we also propose a low-complexity alternative algorithm, namely the Improved Iterated Greedy (IIG) algorithm. Simulation results show that the IIG algorithm can achieve close results to those of the BnB algorithm.