Evolutionary offloading in an edge environment

Abstract Due to increasing complexity of mobile applications, and limited computation resources of smart mobile devices, the quality of service requirements of mobile application can be enhanced by offloading the computation tasks of the mobile applications to edge servers, such as cloudlets, which exist at the edge of wireless networks. However, improper placement of mobile tasks on the edge servers may increase the waiting time and the transmission time. This, in turn, will increase the response time, and eventually violates the quality of service. This paper proposes an effective offloading strategy in a mobile edge environment using the queuing networks and an evolutionary algorithm, namely the genetic algorithm (GA). The queuing network is used to model the waiting time and the service time of the mobile tasks on the edge servers. The genetic algorithm finds the best allocation of mobile tasks on the edge servers to minimize tasks response time considering the transmission times and the load conditions on edge servers represented by the waiting times and the service times which are calculated using the queuing network. The proposed GA-based offloading algorithm is compared with another evolutionary algorithm, namely particle swarm optimization (PSO). Experimental evaluations show that the GA-based offloading algorithm outperforms both of round robin offloading and the PSO-based offloading algorithms, and effectively improves mobile applications response time.