Task migration optimization for guaranteeing delay deadline with mobility consideration in mobile edge computing

Abstract Mobile edge computing (MEC) is envisioned to integrate cloud-like capabilities into the edge of networks for improving quality of service (QoS). This makes it possible for users with resource-limited devices to execute computation-intensive tasks by offloading them to MEC nodes. Extensive works have been done for MEC. However, few of them involve user mobility. Whether to migrate task dynamically cannot be ignored when taking QoS into account. In this paper, we try to optimize task migration with user mobility consideration, in which deadlines of tasks are also involved. The problem is proved to be NP-hard. To solve it, we analyze three variants of this problem and devise a group migration (GM) algorithm with known trajectories of users. Our goal is to maximize the number of tasks whose deadlines are guaranteed. Extensive experiments are carried out, and the results confirm that GM algorithm can achieve up 35%-75% performance improvement compared three other common heuristics.