Computation offloading over a shared communication channel for mobile cloud computing

In this paper, we focus on the problem of offloading computation intensive tasks of mobile applications from resource-scarce mobile devices to the servers located at the edge networks in order to minimize the average response time of the applications. We consider a number of mobile devices connected by a shared communication channel to a server located in the edge network and therefore transmission collision occurs if more than one mobile device attempts to transmit data simultaneously. We first formulate the offloading problem as a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem. Since the problem is NP-hard, we design a heuristic algorithm that considers possible transmission collision over the shared channel and offloads efficiently tasks of a mobile application to the server. We demonstrated that our proposed algorithm outperforms previous offloading algorithms significantly in terms of the average response time. Furthermore, we showed that our proposed algorithm yields less energy consumption than previous algorithms in realistic system scenarios.