MOTO: Mobility-Aware Online Task Offloading With Adaptive Load Balancing in Small-Cell MEC

Mobile edge computing is a promising computing paradigm enabling mobile devices to offload computation-intensive tasks to nearby edge servers. However, within small-cell networks, the user mobilities can result in uneven spatio-temporal loads, which have not been well studied by considering adaptive load balancing, thus limiting the system performance. Motivated by the data analytics and observations on a real-world user association dataset in a large-scale WiFi system, in this paper, we investigate the mobility-aware online task offloading problem with adaptive load balancing to minimize the total computation costs. However, the problem is intractable directly without prior knowledge of future user mobility behaviors and spatio-temporal computation loads of edge servers. To tackle this challenge, we transform and decompose the original task offloading optimization problem into two sub-problems, i.e., task offloading control (
ToC
) and server grouping (
SeG
). Then, we devise an online control scheme, named
MOTO
(i.e.,
M
obility-aware
O
nline
T
ask
O
ffloading), which consists of two components, i.e., Long Short Term Memory based algorithm and Dueling Double DQN based algorithm, to efficiently solve the
ToC
and
SeG
sub-problems, respectively. Extensive trace-driven experiments are carried out and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of
MOTO
in reducing computational costs of mobile devices and achieving load balancing when compared to the state-of-the-art benchmarks.