Multi-Hop Multi-Task Partial Computation Offloading in Collaborative Edge Computing

Collaborative edge computing (CEC) is a recent popular paradigm where different edge devices collaborate by sharing data and computation resources. One of the fundamental issues in CEC is to make task offloading decision. However, it is a challenging problem to solve as tasks can be offloaded to a device at multi-hop distance leading to conflicting network flows due to limited bandwidth constraint. There are some works on multi-hop computation offloading problem in the literature. However, existing works have not jointly considered multi-hop partial computation offloading and network flow scheduling that can cause network congestion and inefficient performance in terms of completion time. This article formulates the joint multi-task partial computation offloading and network flow scheduling problem to minimize the average completion time of all tasks. The formulated problem optimizes several dependent decision variables including partial offloading ratio, remote offloading device, start time of tasks, routing path, and start time of network flows. The problem is formulated as an MINLP optimization problem and shown to be NP-hard. We propose a joint partial offloading and flow scheduling heuristic (JPOFH) that decides partial offloading ratio by considering both waiting times at the devices and start time of network flows. We also do the relaxation of formulated MINLP problem to an LP problem using McCormick envelope to give a lower bound solution. Performance comparison done using simulation shows that JPOFH leads to up to 32 percent improvement in average completion time compared to benchmark solutions which do not make a joint decision.