A Cloud–MEC Collaborative Task Offloading Scheme With Service Orchestration

Billions of devices are connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). These devices generate a large volume of data, which poses an enormous burden on conventional networking infrastructures. As an effective computing model, edge computing is collaborative with cloud computing by moving part intensive computation and storage resources to edge devices, thus optimizing the network latency and energy consumption. Meanwhile, the software-defined networks (SDNs) technology is promising in improving the quality of service (QoS) for complex IoT-driven applications. However, building SDN-based computing platform faces great challenges, making it difficult for the current computing models to meet the low-latency, high-complexity, and high-reliability requirements of emerging applications. Therefore, a cloud-mobile edge computing (MEC) collaborative task offloading scheme with service orchestration (CTOSO) is proposed in this article. First, the CTOSO scheme models the computational consumption, communication consumption, and latency of task offloading and implements differentiated offloading decisions for tasks with different resource demand and delay sensitivity. What is more, the CTOSO scheme introduces orchestrating data as services (ODaS) mechanism based on the SDN technology. The collected metadata are orchestrated as high-quality services by MEC servers, which greatly reduces the network load caused by uploading resources to the cloud on the one hand, and on the other hand, the data processing is completed at the edge layer as much as possible, which achieves the load balancing and also reduces the risk of data leakage. The experimental results demonstrate that compared to the random decision-based task offloading scheme and the maximum cache-based task offloading scheme, the CTOSO scheme reduces delay by approximately 73.82%–74.34% and energy consumption by 10.71%–13.73%.