A Fast and Efficient Task Offloading Approach in Edge-Cloud Collaboration Environment

Abstract

Edge-cloud collaboration fully utilizes the advantages of sufficient computing resources in cloud computing and the low latency of edge computing and better meets the needs of various Internet of Things (IoT) application scenarios. An important research challenge for edge-cloud collaboration is how to offload tasks to edge and cloud quickly and efficiently, taking into account different task characteristics, resource capabilities, and optimization objectives. To address the above challenge, we propose a fast and efficient task offloading approach in edge-cloud collaboration systems that can achieve a near-optimal solution with a low time overhead. First, it proposes an edge-cloud collaborative task offloading model that aims to minimize time delay and resource cost while ensuring the reliability requirements of the tasks. Then, it designs a novel Preprocessing-Based Task Offloading (PBTO) algorithm to quickly obtain a near-optimal solution to the Task Offloading problem in Edge-cloud Collaboration (TOEC) systems. Finally, we conducted extended simulation experiments to compare the proposed PBTO algorithm with the optimal method and two heuristic methods. The experimental results show that the total execution time of the proposed PBTO algorithm is reduced by 87.23%, while the total cost is increased by only 0.0004% compared to the optimal method. The two heuristics, although better than PBTO in terms of execution time, have much lower solution quality, e.g., their total costs are increased by 69.27% and 85.54%, respectively, compared to the optimal method.