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fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2020.3000871, IEEE Internet of
Things Journal
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL
Intelligent Offloading for Collaborative Smart City
Services in Edge Computing
Xiaolong Xu, Member, IEEE, Qihe Huang, Xiaochun Yin, Mahdi Abbasi,
Mohammad Reza Khosravi, and Lianyong Qi∗ , Member, IEEE,
Abstract—Smart city is a fast-developing system enabled by
Internet of things (IoT) with massive collaborative services (e.g.,
intelligent transportation and collaborative diagnosis). Generally,
the terminals in the smart city are provided with limited comput-
ing ability, thus incapable of processing the diversified and cross-
application services. Faced with the insufficient resource provi-
sioning for the collaborative smart city services, edge computing
is emerged as a novel paradigm to provide city terminals with
more processing capacity. Nevertheless, as there is a tremendous
threat of disclosing private information in the offloading of
collaborative services, it is imperative to improve privacy security
in the edge computing. With the intention of addressing the
privacy disclosure, an intelligent offloading method (IOM) for
smart city, realizing privacy preservation, improving offloading
efficiency and promoting edge utility, is proposed. Technically,
information entropy mechanism is employed to be integrated
with edge computing to obtain the balance between privacy
preservation and collaborative service performance. Eventually,
the simulation analysis is implemented to verify the effectiveness
of IOM.
Keywords-IoT, smart cities, collaborative service, intelligent
offloading, edge computing
I. I NTRODUCTION
Benefiting from the rapid development of Internet of things
(IoT), cities are endowed with abundant connected devices and
sensors that are applied to collecting and handling information
[1]. By appropriately processing and utilizing the massive
data produced from IoT, diverse collaborative services (i.e.,
intelligent medical diagnosis, smart campus, elderly assistance
X. Xu and Q. Huang are with the School of Computer and Software,
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044,
China.
X. Xu is also with the Facility Horticulture Laboratory of Universities
in Shandong, WeiFang University of Science & Technology, ShouGuang,
China, the Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environ-
ment and Equipment Technology (CICAEET), Nanjing University of Infor-
mation Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, China and the Engineering
Research Center of Digital Forensics, Ministry of Education, Nanjing 210044,
China.
Email: njuxlxu@gmail.com;qhuang@nuist.edu.cn
X. Yin is with the Facility Horticulture Laboratory of Universities in
Shandong, WeiFang University of Science & Technology, ShouGuang , China.
E-mail: xiaochunyin@wfust.edu.cn
M. Abbasi is with the School of Computer Engineering, Engineering
Faculty, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran.
E-mail: abbasi@basu.ac.ir
R. Khosravi is with the Computer Engineering Department, Persian Gulf
University, Bushehr, Iran, and Department of Electrical and Electronic Engi-
neering, Shiraz University of Technology, Shiraz, Iran.
E-mail: m.khosravi@sutech.ac.ir
L. Qi is with the School of Information Science and Engineering, Qufu
Normal University, Qufu 273165, China.
E-mail: lianyongqi@gmail.com
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1
and etc.) spring out, which hastens a new conception “smart
city” [2][3]. Based on the collaborative services, it is promising
for the city to facilitate the life of residents and improve the
QoE (quality of experience) of visitors with the premise of de-
creasing squandering city resources. Additionally, smart cities
are equipped with powerful capability to monitor, understand
and make adjustments to their citizens [4][5]. However, due
to the exponentially growing data and the limited computing
resources of terminals, relying solely on the IoT devices in
smart city is hard to fully achieve collaborative services which
are often real-time and delay-sensitive. To improve the QoS
(quality of service) in smart cities, drawing support from
external resources with more computing ability is imperative
[6][7].
Edge computing, which fully utilizes computing resources
in the edge and can cater for the real-time requirements,
has been promoted as an efficient solution to alleviate the
problems of insufficient computing resources in cities [8][9].
Technically, edge computing could provide a collaborative
service environment and enough computing capability for the
smart cities [10][11]. Concretely, it deploys abundant edge
nodes (EN) on the side of roads or next to buildings, equipping
the city terminals with extra computing resources [12][13].
Benefiting from the relatively richer computing resources
and low end-to-end communication latency, edge computing
reduces the response time of the collaborative city services
to a great extent. Infrequently, if an EN is overloaded, the
computing requests from city terminals would be rejected and
the service holds up in the EN until the essential resources
are available again [14][15]. Thus, the queuing services could
be passed to another EN, which avoids plenty of waiting time
[16][17]. In view of this situation, the queuing time would be
taken into account in service offloading to achieve the balance
between the queuing and offloading [18].
Nevertheless, there is a real threat of disclosing private
information, especially in the offloading of collaborative ser-
vices [19]. In the smart city, the terminals are required to
propagate the sensitive information to the ENs, and then the
processing results of service could be returned [20]. During
the service offloading, unexpected leakage of sensitive data
(i.e., individual location, phone number and etc.) is a terri-
ble occurrence [21][22]. Considering most devices lack the
privacy protection, the information security of the individuals
could not be guaranteed [23]. As the collaborative services
usually carry sensitive information of individuals, avoiding
privacy leakage during offloading among ENs is necessary.
On the other hand, given that the ENs are distributed every-
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2020.3000871, IEEE Internet of
Things Journal
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL
where in the smart city, the load balance must be ensured to
improve resources efficiency and avoid the waste of resources.
Furthermore, the energy consumption of ENs is obligated to
be optimized to obtain the sustainable development of smart
cities. In addition to the edge utility, i.e., load balance and
energy consumption, the offloading efficiency should also be
considered for the less service response time brings about
the better quality of service. However, it is a challenge to
achieve trade-offs among minimizing service response time,
optimizing energy consumption and maintaining load balance
while guaranteeing the data security. In view of this challenge,
an intelligent offloading method for collaborative smart city
services in edge computing, named IOM, is devised.
The main contributions of our paper are as follows:
• The M/M/Z/∞/∞ queuing model is established for the
offloaded services to reckon the average waiting time in
the EN.
• The offloading efficiency, the edge utility and the privacy
analysis are modeled for the collaborative smart city
services.
• An intelligent offloading method is devised to obtain the
goal of minimizing energy consumption, reducing load
balance and optimizing service response time.
• Conduct comparative experiments to verify the effective-
ness and efficiency of IOM.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section
II presents the relevant studies of this work. Section III models
the offloading efficiency and the edge utility. The privacy
analysis and the details of IOM are expounded in Section IV.
The experiment results are presented in Section V. In Section
VI, the summary of this paper is given.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Smart cities have gained rapid development, providing
tremendous collaborative service for residents inhabiting cities
[24]. Smart cities are based on a mass of devices and terminals
embedded in the citied to collect and process information. But
for the limited computing ability provided with terminals in
city, it is challenging to achieve high quality of collaborative
service for smart cities [4][25].
In [26], authors utilized the edge computing as a novel
paradigm to process the IoT service placement in smart
cities. They took the load balance, energy consumption and
resource utilization into consideration to optimize the quality
of IoT services in smart city. Additionally, the privacy is also
considered to ensure the privacy of citizens in their framework.
Hossain et al. [27] introduced intelligent health-care detection
paradigm which could process enormous health data related to
health-care and give prompt analysis in smart cities. Fadi et
al. [28] gave an overview of privacy preservation in the smart
city and they reviewed some current solutions with regard to
privacy protection of communication in IoT devices.
Currently, edge computing is leveraged to be integrated with
smart cities to accommodate for offloaded services, greatly
improving the QoS and expanding the scope of services. The
applicability of edge computing in computation offloading
has been verified by many researchers. Guo et al. [12] con-
tributed to constructing a distributed and trusted system in
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2
the edge computing. With blockchain technique, they ensured
trusted authentication and achieved active track of terminals
while provided secure connection for edge nodes. Thai et al.
[13] focused on the optimization in the edge computing and
they developed an approximation algorithm to optimize the
workload and capacity during offloading. Bonadio et al. [29]
analyzed the performance of edge computing, giving a Markov
system model with server queuing and reneging requests to
obtain the performance evaluation of the edge computing. Lei
et al. [30] depended on the service response time and energy
consumption to introduce a task allocation scheme, achieving
the proper allocation of tasks in edge computing.
To offload the collaborative smart city services, designing
an appreciate offloading strategy is imperative. Additionally,
the offloading strategy is obligated to ensure privacy security
which could avoid the disclosure of personal information.
Xiong et al. [31] studied the interactions among service
providers in the edge computing and promoted privacy preser-
vation using blockchain to support proof-of-work in the of-
floading services, which guaranteed the profits of providers.
Li et al. [32] aimed to improve the revenues with the premise
of satisfying variable reliability requirements and they placed
primary network functions to cloudlets in order to meet users’
requirements.
However, few researchers took the service response time,
energy consumption, load balance and data security into
account to optimize the offloading strategy. And it is still
challenging to design an offloading strategy which achieves
the four objectives mentioned above, especially protecting the
privacy of citizens. Thus, an intelligent offloading method for
collaborative smart city services, named IOM, is devised.
III. S YSTEM M ODEL AND P ROBLEM F ORMULATION
In this section, the system model of the edge computing for
smart city is designed. To optimize service offloading, three
models, i.e., the service response time, the energy consumption
and the load balance are proposed. Key terms in this model
are described in Table 1.
Fig. 1. A collaborative smart city service offloading framework in edge
computing
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TABLE I
K EY T ERMS AND D ESCRIPTIONS Denote Pinum as the probability there are i offloaded
services in the EN. When the number of smart city services
Terms Descriptions in the EN is idle, the probability could be calculated and it is
J The quantity of ENs given by
N The quantity of terminals 1
P0num = Z−1 . (3)
R The set of ENs, R = {r1 , r2 , · · · , rJ } P ξZ 1
+ · ξ n
E The set of terminals, E = {e1 , e2 , · · · , eN } Z!(1−ξZ ) n!
n=0
S The set of services, S = {s1 , s2 , · · · , sN }
Then the probability any number of services offloaded to the
Z The number of VMs for one EN
EN could be calculated based on P0num , and it is expressed
tqu The queuing time
as
ttr
n The transmission time of propagating the service by the en
(γ/β)i
(
tex
n,j The execution time of executing the service sn in the EN rj num i! · P0num , (1 ≤ i ≤ Z),
Pi = (γ/β)i
(4)
ttot
n,j The service response time of offloading the sn to the EN rj · P num
, (i > Z).
Z!Z (i−Z) 0
etot
n,j The energy consumption of offloading the sn to the EN rj
If there are less than Z services offloaded to the EN, which
lba The load balance
means there are sufficient resources in the EN for offloaded
services, the queue time tqu would be zero. In this case, the
city service is supposed to be executed once it is propagated
A. A Smart City Architecture with Edge Computing
to the EN. When the number of offloaded services in the EN
A collaborative smart city service offloading framework in exceeds the number of VMs, the services are considered to
edge computing is presented in Fig. 1. An EN is composed wait and queue up. The average waiting time is expressed as
of an edge server with computing capability and a road side ∞
X P0 ·ξ Z · ξZ
unit with receiving ability. In this scene, J ENs are deployed tqu = (i − Z) · Pi = 2 (i > Z). (5)
near the roadside in the smart city, and its set is represented by i=Z+1
Z!(1 − ξZ )
R = {r1 , r2 , · · · , rJ }. The terminals are distributed in the city The time consumed by transmitting the service sn to the
with random. Denote E = {e1 , e2 , · · · , eN } as the terminal EN is denoted by ttr
n , and it is calculated by
set. Besides, each terminal has a service requiring offloading,
J
and the service set is denoted as S = {s1 , s2 , · · · , sN }. X vn
ttr
n = xn,j · , (6)
The data size of the service sn is given by vn while the bwwi
j=1
computation size is given by cn . For these smart city services
are computation-intensive and need immediate feedback, the where vn is the data size of the service sn , and bwwi is the
terminal would propagate its service to the EN with sufficient bandwidth of the wireless channel.
computing resources. Denote xn,j ∈ {0, 1} as a binary The execution time of the city services is dependent on
variable to represent whether the sn is offloaded to the EN rj . the computing ability of the EN. Denote texn,j as the time of
If xn,j equals 1, the terminal en would propagate its service executing the service sn in the EN rj , and it is given by
to the EN rj . Otherwise, there is no connection between the J
X cn
terminal en and the EN rj . tex
n,j = xn,j · , (7)
j=1
kj

B. Service response time Analysis where cn and kj are the computation size of the service sn
and the computing ability of the EN rj , respectively.
In our model, the service response time consists of the
Afterwards, the response time of the service sn is expressed
waiting time, the transmission time and the execution time.
as
The number of VMs in each EN is assumed to be Z. ttot qu
+ tex tr
n,j = t n,j + tn,j . (8)
Based on the queuing theory, the collaborative smart city
services arrive the EN with the Poisson distribution [33], C. Energy consumption Analysis
and the parameter is represented by γ. Besides, the resources
supplying time of the VM is also considered to follow the The energy expenditure produced by the propagation of the
Poisson distribution, and its parameter is denoted by β. Then terminal en is calculated as
the M/M/Z/∞/∞ queuing model for collaborative smart etr tr
n = tn · ppn , (9)
city services are established to calculate the waiting time in the
where ppn is the propagation power of the terminal en .
EN. Once the mechanism of service offloading arrives stable
The energy consumption of executing the service sn in the
state, the service intensity of one VM is given by
EN rj is given by
γ
ξ= . (1) eex
β n,j = vn · epj , (10)

For each EN is equipped with Z VMs, the service intensity where epj is the executing power of the EN rj .
of one EN is expressed as Afterwards, the total energy power of offloading the service
sn to the EN rj is given by
γ
ξZ = (ξZ < 1). (2) etot tr ex
Z ·β n,j = en + en,j . (11)

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D. Load Balance Analysis Thus, the relevant connection of sn,g and prn,g could be
In the offloading of collaborative services, the services represented by
are supposed to be propagated to different ENs to obtain    
execution. To realize the balanced resources allocation and sn sn,1 sn,2 ··· sn,g
= . (18)
avoid resources wasting, the load balance is introduced to P rn prn,1 prn,2 ··· prn,g
evaluate whether the offloading strategy is appropriate. Define the the entropy information value of service data as
The number of services received by ENs is obligated to be K = k(s1 ), k(s2 ), . . . , k(sn ). The privacy entropy information
balanced, and the operating VMs of each EN are an important value of sn could be given by
feature. As to an EN rj , its number of occupied VMs is given
G
by X
k (sn ) = − prn,g · log2 prn,g . (19)
 g=1
N
P
 Z, ( xn,j > Z), Then, the relevant connection of the entropy value K and


ocj = n=1 offloading strategy U is expressed as
N N (12)
P P
xn,j , (1 ≤ xn,j ≤ Z).



n=1 n=1    
U u1 u2 ··· un
Based on ocj , the average occupied VMs of each EN is = . (20)
K k (s1 ) k (s2 ) · · · k (sn )
expressed as
J In the last, the summation of privacy entropy value of all
1X the service data is given by
ar = ocj . (13)
J j=1
N
1 X
With the average occupied VMs of each EN, the load k(s) = k (sn ) . (21)
N n=1
balance is given by
Based on the privacy entropy analysis, the privacy protection
J
1X 2 obtains quantification. In IOM, the privacy entropy value is a
lba = (ocj − ar) . (14)
J j=1 meaningful standard to evaluate the ability of the protection
for the sensitive information. The higher the privacy entropy
is, the more security the offloading process provides.
E. Problem Definition
The service response time, the load balance and the edge B. IOM Design
consumption are important indicators to evaluate the perfor-
mance of the edge computing. Based on the models given ACO performs the search of the global optimal solution
above, the problem of service offloading in edge environment with relatively quick speed and guaranteed efficiency [34].
is formulated as Additionally, the elitist ant allows the algorithm to converge
faster. In the beginning of the IOM, the graph structure is well
min t, min e, min lba. (15) constructed by the ENs and services. Then, by designing suit-
able effect value function, improving ant amount and ensuring
IV. P RIVACY A NALYSIS AND IOM D ESIGN iteration times, the ACO algorithm would be perfectly applied
to the searching for the optimal offloading strategy in the edge
A. Privacy Analysis computing.
As expounded in section II, there are N devices with
collaborative smart city services. The relationship of offloading
strategy U and the collaborative smart city services S is
expressed by
   
U u1 u2 · · · un
= . (16)
S s1 s2 · · · sn
According to the theory of information entropy, the data
of service sn waiting for the offloading is divided into G
parts, which is convenient for calculating the possibility of
propagating the g-th part of the service. Define the solicit
service set as sn = {sn,1 , sn,2 , · · · , sn,G }. Denote χ as the
parameter with Poisson distribution [24]. The possibility of
delivering sn,g obeys the Poisson distribution and it is given
by
χg −χ
prn,g = e , g = 1, 2, · · · , G. (17) Fig. 2. An example of service offloading using ACO.
g!

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As depicted in Fig. 2, there are 7 ENs with powerful
computing ability and 8 services waiting for offloading in the
city, and they constitute a structure of the graph. The ant who
goes throughout the graph is considered to accomplish one
offloading strategy. In particular, the nodes in this graph having
pheromones with different concentrations which could affect
the choose of the ant. In most cases, the ant will choose the
node with high pheromones as the next destination like (1,1),
(3,6) and (4,2). Infrequently, the ant will choose to go to the
node with relatively low pheromones like (2,4), which could
avoid falling into local optimal solution.
We initialize the ant colony and then define the start node
with assistance of the service graph. The ants go through the
graph to find the destination from the start node and choose the
route. For they always put some pheromone on the route, the
next ants could choose the optimal route easily. Other ants are
more likely to move on the route with the highest pheromone,
and the next ants also find the route where pheromone in great
quantity, which makes the route with highest effect value could
be found by most of ants.
Firstly, the ENs are encoded, and the computation offloading
strategies are conducted by ants. One ant that accomplishes the
destination represents a solution of the computing resources
allocation problem in the edge. In this method, the effect
function consists of three parts: the service response time, the
energy consumption and the load balance, which are presented
in (8), (10) and (18), respectively. The parameters used in
our method are determined, including the number of ants M ,
pheromone decay rate α and the iteration time l. Denote Ln,j
as the n-th service’s destination EN. The route of the m-
th ant is represented by ROm = (L1,j , L2,j , . . . , Ln,j ) (j =
1, 2, . . . , J). The pheromone releasing mechanism and the
usual debilitating operation are utilized to start the route of
next ants. The decline rate of pheromone is given by
τnj ← (1 − α) · τnj ,
where α is the modified parameter ranging from 0 to 1.
The pheromone undated value in our method is expressed
as

C, (n, j) is on the route of high effect value,
∆τnj =
0, Otherwise ,
(23)
where C is the effect value of the the route with the perfect
performance and the node (n, j) is on the route. Then the
updated pheromone concentration is expressed as τnj ← (1 −
α) · τnj + ∆τnj .
After pheromone debilitating and releasing, M new dif-
ferent routes have been accomplished by the ants. Then, we
conduct the sorting of the M routes based on the effect values
composed of three parts. We search for the ant with highest
effect values and record the route of this elitist ant. The
evaluation of the routes are presented by the corresponding
effect values. After the natural decline of the pheromone
concentration, the pheromone concentration of the node on
the route with highest effect value would be promoted. Then,
the pheromone matrix is updated. The process of conducting
the offloading method using ACO is expounded in Algorithm
1.
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5
The flow chart of IOM which explains the process of IOM
in detail is depicted on Fig. 3. In the beginning, the ant colony
and pheromone matrix are initialized, and the number of ants
is set as M . Then the ant is selected from colony to accomplish
the route in turn. When all the ants of colony reaching their
destinations, the ants will be sorted by the effect value which
is related to their respective routes. Then the route of the ant
with highest fitness value would be recorded. Besides, the
pheromone matrix is updated based on the route of this ant
according to (22) and (23). After the iteration, the recorded
elitist ants are sorted, and the route of the best ant is as the
offloading strategy which is closer to the optimal solution.
Algorithm 1 Offloading services using ACO
Require: The initialized ant colony AC, S and R
Ensure: The optimal offloading strategy RO∗
1: Construct the grapth structure based on the S and R
2: for lrecord = 1 to l do
3: for the ant in AC do
4: Go through the graph by the ant
5: Calculate objective functions by (8), (10) and (18)
6: Calculate the effect value of the ant
7: end for
8: Conduct pheromone debilitating
9: Sort ants by the effect value
10: Select the ant with the highest effect value
11: Update pheromone matrix
12: Record the route of the selected ant
13: end for
14: Choose the route with the beset performance as RO ∗
15: return RO ∗
V. E XPERIMENT
(22)
A. Experiment Setup
In the simulation, the collaborative smart city services with
different data size would be propagated to the diverse ENs
relying on the different offloading methods. The service scale
is set as 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, 3000, 4500. Besides, the
service size is set with random, ranging from 1 MB to 4
MB. The computing ability of ENs is considered to be from
3 GHZ to 6 GHZ. The energy power of the ENs is set from
0.4 J/GHZ to 0.8 J/GHZ. The experiments are executed in
a personal computer with Intel Core i5-8500HQ 3.2GHz and
16GB RAM.
B. Comparative Algorithms
The methods which are used to compare the method pro-
posed in the paper to optimize the offloading of collaborative
smart city services are Next Fit (NF) [18], First Fit (FF) [35]
and Benchmark. The descriptions of the three comparative
methods are as follows.
• NF: The ENs are sorted based on their computing ability.
Then the service would send offloading requirement to the
EN in turn. If the EN has free VMs, the service would be
received. Otherwise, it would continue to send offloading
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Fig. 3. The programming flowchart of IOM.
requirement to the next EN. When the service is received,
the next service send the offloading requirement to the
same EN.
• FF:
The service would send offloading requirement to the EN
that has been sorted with computing ability. Compared to
the NF, when the service is received by the EN, the next
service conduct a new requiring circle from the first EN.
• Benchmark: Collaborative smart city services will be
propagated to the EN with random. If all the VMs in the
EN are not free, the service will be offloaded to another
random EN.
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6
Fig. 4. Comparison of the occupied ENs.
Fig. 5. Comparison of the energy consumption.
C. Experiment Evaluation
In the process of service offloading, the proposed IOM
requires optimizing the service response time, energy con-
sumption and the load balance variance at a certain moment
to obtain balanced strategies. The utility values for balanced
strategies generated by ACO at different service scales are
compared.
1) Comparison of The Occupied ENs: The comparison of
occupied is depicted in Fig. 4. From Fig. 4, it shows different
number of occupied edge nodes of Benchmark, FF, NF and
IOM respectively with the increasing number of collaborative
smart city services. IOM keeps a relatively high occupancy
rate of ENs, and it will occupy all the ENs when the number
of services is beyond a certain value.The occupied ENs of
FF and NF are with quantitative similarity and the number of
nodes is really small, showing that they could not make the
fully use computing resources in the edge. In Benchmark, the
collaborative smart city services are offloaded with random,
which ensures the high number of occupied ENs.
2) Comparison of The Energy Consumption: The compari-
son of total energy consumption is showed in Fig. 5. From Fig.
5 it can be seen that NF produces the most energy consumption
because it expends a huge amount of energy on the backhauls
during high uploading period. The energy expenditure of FF
is in the nick of NF for it doesn’t lay stress on the energy
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2020.3000871, IEEE Internet of
Things Journal
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL
Fig. 6. Comparison of the service response time.
Fig. 7. Comparison of the load balance.
consumption level when making offloading decisions. In line
with our expectations, IOM consumes similar energy with FF,
maintaining relatively low energy consumption with the num-
ber of services throughout the whole simulation. Furthermore,
IOM produces less energy than NF with increasing services,
which implies stability of IOM could be improved with the
increasing number of offloaded services.
Fig. 8. Comparison of the transmission time.
3) Comparison of The Transmission Time: The comparison
of transmission time among IOM, Benchmark, FF and NF is
presented on Fig. 8. NF consumes the longest propagation time
during offloading, for it always transmits the service to the pre-
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7
vious EN and is unaware of the propagation process. FF also
consumes relatively longer propagation time, since it chooses
to offload service to the EN in turn without consciousness of
transmission. Benchmark consumes relatively shorter propaga-
tion time due to its random offloading strategy, resulting small
propagation loss. For the service response time is an important
optimal objective of IOM, IOM performs in decreasing the
propagation time. Besides, its average propagation time is no
more than 0.2s with the increasing number of services, largely
shorter than other comparison experiments.
Fig. 9. Comparison of the executing time.
4) Comparison of The Executing Time: The comparison
of executing time among IOM, Benchmark, FF and NF is
presented on Fig. 9. As Fig. 9 depicted, NF produces the
longest executing time during offloading and FF also produces
relatively longer time. NF is unconscious of the execution
process usually transmits the service to the previous EN.
Besides, FF always chooses to offload service to the EN
in turn without consciousness of reducing execution time.
Benchmark consumes relatively shorter executing time due
to its random offloading strategy, resulting small executing
loss. Since the service response time is the major optimization
objective of IOM and the propagation time is the major part of
total time, IOM does a good job in reducing executing time.
What’s more, its average executing time is no more than 0.15s
with the increasing number of services, which occupies edge
advantages compared to other methods.
5) Comparison of The Service Response Time: When ser-
vice offloading is performed, the service response time is
quantified as a goal of evaluating the superiority of the offload
strategy. In Fig. 6, compared to other methods, IOM using the
ACO determines strategies with lower service response time.
Since the offloading strategies of NF are based on the previous
offloading strategy, NF saves some time compared to FF. The
strategies determined by IOM have shorter execution time,
which results in less completion time for the IOM. In addition,
IOM is significantly better than Benchmark by comparing the
difference of completion time between Benchmark and IOM.
6) Comparison of The Load Balance: The load balance
variance is another optimization goal for determining the
strategy of service offloading. To avoid the network congestion
and ensure the utilization of ENs, the services are uniformly
offloaded to all ENs. Fig. 7 portrays the number of the
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2020.3000871, IEEE Internet of
Things Journal
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL
occupied ENs. IOM usually maintains a high occupancy rate
of ENs, and almost all ENs are occupied when the service
size reaches a certain size. In Benchmark, the services are
randomly offloaded, so there are also many ENs that are
occupied. However, FF and NF only occupy a small number
of nodes, and it results in a high load-balance variance in FF
and NF when the service scale is small.
Fig. 10. Comparison of the privacy entropy.
7) Comparison of Privacy Entropy: Fig. 10 presents the
privacy entropy compared by the IOM, Benchmark, FF and
NF. For the privacy entropy represents the security of offload-
ing, the higher the privacy entropy is, the more security the
offloading process provides . With the increase number ser-
vices, the privacy entropy gains linear growth. Besides, IOM
keeps the highest privacy entropy among the four methods,
meaning it performs well in the terms of privacy protection.
VI. C ONCLUSION
As for collaborative smart city services, weakness of long
service response time and low QoS needs to be improved. Cur-
rently, edge computing is integrated with smart city to promote
the inherent shortcomings of terminals in cities. In this paper,
we design an intelligent offloading method for collaborative
smart city services, named IOM. This method contributes to
achieving the trade-offs among minimizing service response
time, optimizing energy consumption and maintaining load
balance while guaranteeing the privacy preservation during
service offloading. In the experiment evaluation, the effective-
ness and efficiency of IOM is verified. In our next work, we
will devote to applying IOM to real life, taking more real
details of smart city into account.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research is supported by the Financial and Science
Technology Plan Project of Xinjiang Production and Con-
struction Corps under grant no. 2020DB005, and the National
Natural Science Foundation of China under grant no.61702277
and no.61872219. This research is also supported by the
Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher
Education Institutions (PAPD) fund.
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8
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Xiaolong Xu (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D.
degree in computer science and technology from
Nanjing University, China, in 2016. He was a
Research Scholar with Michigan State University,
USA, from April 2017 to May 2018. He is currently
an Associate Professor with the School of Computer
and Software, Nanjing University of Information
Science and Technology. He has published more
than 80 peer-review articles in international journals
and conferences, including the IEEE Transactions on
Intelligent Transactions Systems (TITS), the IEEE
Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), the IEEE Transactions on Cloud
Computing (TCC), the IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), the IEEE
Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS), the IEEE Internet
of Things Journal (IEEE IOT), the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in
Computational Intelligence (TETCI), the IEEE International Conference on
Web Services (ICWS), and ICSOC. He received the Best Paper Award from
the IEEE CBD 2016, and the TOP citation award from the Computational
Intelligence journal in 2019. His research interests include edge computing,
the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and big data.
2327-4662 (c) 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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9
Qihe Huang is currently working towards his B.S.
degree in software engineering at School of Com-
puter and Software in Nanjing University of In-
formation Science and Technology. His research
interests include edge computing and IoT.
Xiaochun Yin received the B.S. degree in educa-
tion and technology from Qufu Normal University,
Qufu, China in 2004, and received the M.S. degree
in education and technology from Nanjing Normal
University, Nanjing, China in 2007, and received
the Ph.D. from Dongseo University, Korea in 2015.
She is now working as an associate professor in
Weifang University of Science &Technology China.
Her research interests include network security, IoT
security, authentication protocol and agricultural in-
telligence systems.
Mahdi Abbasi is an Assistant Professor at the
Department of Computer Engineering, Engineering
Faculty, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran. Dr.
Abbasi has received his BSc, MSc and PhD in the
field of computer engineering from Sharif Univer-
sity of Technology, Tehran, Iran, and University of
Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran. His interests include computer
architecture, computer vision and image processing,
machine learning, internet of things and computer
networking.
Mohammad R. Khosravi is now with the Depart-
ment of Computer Engineering, Persian Gulf Univer-
sity, Bushehr, Iran, and has been with Department
of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Shiraz
University of Technology, Shiraz, Iran. Mohammad
has studied electrical engineering with expertise in
communications and signal processing for BSc, MSc
and PhD degrees, all from Iranian universities in
2013, 2015 and 2020, respectively. His main inter-
ests include statistical signal and image processing,
medical bioinformatics, radar imaging and satellite
remote sensing, and computer communications.
Lianyong Qi received his PhD degree in Department
of Computer Science and Technology from Nanjing
University, China, in 2011. Now, he is an asso-
ciate professor of the School of Information Science
and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Education
Big Data, Qufu Normal University, China. He has
already published more than 50 papers including
JSAC, TCC, TBD, FGCS, JCSS, CCPE, ICWS and
ICSOC, etc. His research interests include services
computing, big data and IoT.