Toward Computation Offloading in Edge Computing: A Survey

The explosive growth of massive data generation from Internet of Things in industrial, agricultural and scientific communities has led to a rapid increase for data analytics in cloud data centers. The ubiquitous and pervasive demand for near-data processing urges the edge computing paradigm in recent years. Edge computing is promising for less network backbone bandwidth usage and thus less data center side processing pressure, as well as enhanced service responsiveness and data privacy protection. Computation offloading plays a crucial role in edge computing in terms of network packets transmission and system responsiveness through dynamic task partitioning between cloud data centers and edge servers and edge devices. In this paper a thorough literature review is conducted to reveal the state-of-the-art of computation offloading in edge computing. Various aspects of computation offloading, including energy consumption minimization, Quality of Services guarantee, and Quality of Experiences enhancement are surveyed. Moreover, resource scheduling approaches, gaming and tradeoffing among system performance and overheads for computation offloading decision making are also reviewed.