Distributed Threshold-Based Offloading for Heterogeneous Mobile Edge Computing

—In this paper, we consider a large-scale heterogeneous mobile edge computing system, where each device’s mean computing task arrival rate, mean service rate, mean energy consumption, and mean offloading latency are drawn from different bounded continuous probability distributions to reflect the diverse compute-intensive applications, mobile devices with different computing capabilities and battery efficiencies, and different types of wireless access networks (e.g., 4G/5G cellular networks, WiFi). We consider a class of distributed threshold-based randomized offloading policies and develop a threshold update algorithm based on its computational load, average offloading latency, average energy consumption, and edge server processing time, depending on the server utilization. We show that there always exists a unique Mean-Field Nash Equilibrium (MFNE) in the large-system limit when the task processing times of mobile devices follow an exponential distribution. This is achieved by carefully partitioning the space of mean arrival rates to account for the discrete structure of each device’s optimal threshold. Moreover, we show that our proposed threshold update algorithm converges to the MFNE. Finally, we perform simulations to corroborate our theoretical results and demonstrate that our proposed algorithm still performs well in more general setups based on the collected real-world data and outperforms the well-known probabilistic offloading policy.