Survey on Mobile Edge-Cloud Computing: A Taxonomy on Computation offloading Approaches

With the technological evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and wireless communications, a wide variety of new complex mobile applications and different services have rapidly increased. Nevertheless, these devices are considered constrained to processing such applications, due to the limitation of battery capacity and high-demand computation for these applications. Mobile cloud comping (MCC) is considered as an appropriate solution for addressing this problem and battery the battery lifetime of these devices, in which the intensive-computation tasks will be offloaded and processed at a conventional centralized cloud. However, cloud computing solution introduces a high communication delay which makes the computation offloading inappropriate for processing real-time applications. To tackle the problem of delay, a new emerging paradigm has been introduced, called mobile edge computing (MEC), in which the computation and storage capabilities of cloud computing have been provided at the edge of the network that enables such applications to be processed as well as satisfying the delay requirements. To this end, compared to other surveys, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on computation offloading on edge-cloud computing combination. In addition, we provide a novel taxonomy on computation offloading at edge-cloud computing combination and introduce the most and common recent computation offloading models regarding this taxonomy. Furthermore, we highlight the main strengths, weaknesses and other issues which require further consideration. Finally, open research challenges and new research trends in edge-cloud computing will be discussed.