Software-Defined Computational Offloading for Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Computational offloading advances the deployment of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) in the next generation communication networks. However, the distributed nature of the mobile users and the complex applications make it challenging to schedule the tasks reasonably among multiple devices. Therefore, by leveraging the idea of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Service Composition (SC), we propose a Software-Defined Service Composition model (SDSC). In this model, the SDSC controller is deployed at the edge of the network and composes service in a centralized manner to reduce the latency of the task execution and the traffic on the access links by satisfying the user-specific requirement. We formulate the low latency service composition as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) to make it a user-centric approach. With the advent of the SDN, the global view and the control of the entire network are made available to the network controller which is further leveraged by our SDSC approach.

Furthermore, the service discovery and the offloading of tasks are designed for MEC environment so that the users can have a complex and robust system. Moreover, this approach performs the task execution in a distributed manner. We also define the QoS model which provides the composition rule that forms the best possible service composition at the time of need.

Moreover, we have extended our SDSC model to involve the constant mobility of the mobile devices. To solve the mobility issue, we propose a mobility model and a mobility-aware QoS approach enabled in the SDSC model. The experimental simulation results demonstrate that our approach can obtain better performance than the energy saving greedy algorithm and the random offloading approach in a mobile environment.