Stochastic programming based multi-arm bandit offloading strategy for internet of things

Abstract

In order to solve the high latency of traditional cloud computing and the processing capacity limitation of Internet of Things (IoT) users, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) migrates computing and storage capabilities from the remote data center to the edge of network, providing users with computation services quickly and directly. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the randomness caused by the movement of the IoT user on decision-making for offloading, where the connection between the IoT user and the MEC servers is uncertain. This uncertainty would be the main obstacle to assign the task accurately. Consequently, if the assigned task cannot match well with the real connection time, a migration (connection time is not enough to process) would be caused. In order to address the impact of this uncertainty, we formulate the offloading decision as an optimization problem considering the transmission, computation and migration. With the help of Stochastic Programming(SP), we use the posteriori recourse to compensate for inaccurate predictions. Meanwhile, in heterogeneous networks, considering multiple candidate MEC servers could be selected simultaneously due to overlapping, we also introduce the Multi-Arm Bandit (MAB) theory for MEC selection. The extensive simulations validate the improvement and effectiveness of the proposed SP-based Multi-arm bandit Method (SMM) for offloading in terms of reward, cost, energy consumption and delay. The results show that SMM can achieve about 20% improvement compared with the traditional offloading method that does not consider the randomness, and it also outperforms the existing SP/MAB based method for offloading.

Keywords

• Multi-access computing
• Internet of things
• Offloading
• Stochastic programming
• Multi-arm bandit