Journal Pre-proof

Adaptive delay-energy balanced partial offloading strategy in Mobile Edge Computing

networks

Shumei Liu, Yao Yu, Lei Guo, Phee Lep Yeoh, Branka Vucetic, Yonghui Li

PII: S2352-8648(22)00122-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcan.2022.05.029
Reference: DCAN 454

To appear in: Digital Communications and Networks

Received Date: 14 April 2021

Revised Date: 24 May 2022
Accepted Date: 29 May 2022

Please cite this article as: S. Liu, Y. Yu, L. Guo, P.L. Yeoh, B. Vucetic, Y. Li, Adaptive delay-energy
balanced partial offloading strategy in Mobile Edge Computing networks, Digital Communications and
Networks (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcan.2022.05.029.

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Digital Communications and Networks(DCN)

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dcan

Adaptive delay-energy balanced partial

offloading strategy in Mobile Edge
Computing networks

Shumei Liua,b , Yao Yu∗a,b , Lei Guoc , Phee Lep Yeohd , Branka Vuceticd , Yonghui Lid

of
a School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China
b Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing in Medical Image, Ministry of Education, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China

ro
c School of Communication and Information Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications,

Chongqing 400065, China

d School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia
-p
re
Abstract
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Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-based computation offloading is a promising application paradigm for serving large numbers of
users with various delay and energy requirements. In this paper, we propose a flexible MEC-based requirement-adaptive partial
offloading model to accommodate each user’s specific preference regarding delay and energy consumption. To address the
dimensional differences between time and energy, we introduce two normalized parameters and then derive the computational
na

overhead of processing tasks. Different from existing works, this paper considers practical variations in the user request patterns,
and exploits a flexible partial offloading mode to minimize computation overheads subject to tolerable delay, task workload and
power constraints. Since the resulting problem is non-convex, we decouple it into two convex subproblems and present an
ur

iterative algorithm to obtain a feasible offloading solution. Numerical experiments show that our proposed scheme achieves a
significant improvement in computation overheads compared with existing schemes.
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c 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

KEYWORDS:
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), Delay, Energy consumption, Dynamic balance, Partial computation offloading

1. Introduction to the remote cloud for computing and processing due

to their limited computation capability [3]. Neverthe-
With the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) era, a less, the explosive growth of participating users and
large number of mobile users will be connected to computationally intensive IoT applications will bring
wireless networks, resulting in new applications and challenging burdens to the cloud server and transmis-
services such as connected vehicles, interactive gam- sion links, resulting in significant performance degra-
ing and Augmented Reality (AR) [1, 2]. Tradition- dations in terms of high delay and energy consumption
ally, mobile users need to send their application data [4, 5].
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is expected to ad-
* Corresponding author. dress the above challenges. It aims at pushing rich
E-email Addresses: liusmneu@163.com (S. Liu), computation resources and network functions to the
yuyao@mail.neu.edu.cn (Y. Yu), guolei@cqupt.edu.cn
(L. Guo), phee.yeoh@sydney.edu.au (P. L. network edge by deploying MEC servers such as Ac-
Yeoh), branka.vucetic@sydney.edu.au (B. Vucetic), cess Points (APs) [6, 7]. MEC will enable mobile de-
yonghui.li@sydney.edu.au (Y. Li). vices to offload computation tasks to nearby APs for
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Sci-
ence Foundation of China under Grant 62171113 and 61941113,
efficient execution via high data-rate wireless links [8,
and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Uni- 9]. By doing so, MEC can support a variety of emerg-
versities under Grant N2116003 and N2116011. ing computation-intensive applications, and bring to
2 Shumei Liu, et al.
mobile users significant benefits, such as lower service
delay, lower energy consumption, and better Quality
of Experience (QoE) [10]. There are two offloading
modes in MEC networks, namely, binary and partial
computation offloading [11]. In binary mode [11], the
computation tasks are indivisible, and each user can
either complete them using local computing or offload
them entirely to the MEC server for processing. In
partial mode [12], each user can divide their compu-
tation tasks into two parts, which can be processed in
parallel by offloading one part to the MEC server and
completing the other part using local computing. Ob-
viously, binary offloading is a special case of a partial
one. Hence, in this paper, we consider an MEC net-
work with partial offloading due to its general flexibil-
ity and practicability.
Computation offloading in MEC networks requires
the efficient allocation of various wireless resources
(e.g., transmit power, bandwidth, and computing re-
sources) and offloading rate [13, 14]. It is known that
different task offloading requirements correspond to
strikingly different resource allocation solutions [15].
For users, service delay and device energy consump-
tion greatly affect users’ task satisfaction and long-
re
term QoE [16]. Therefore, delay and energy consump-
tion are the two main concerns of users in the compu-
tation offloading process. In reality, the degree and ur-
lP
gency of delay and energy consumption requirements
will vary in different scenarios and situations. For ex-
ample, the applications in 3D games and tactile Inter-
na
net usually have very stringent requirements to guar-
antee low delay performance, while the requirements
on energy consumption are relatively less strict [16].
ur
However, a device with short battery life always pri-
oritizes energy consumption compared to their delay
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requirements. Therefore, to satisfy the QoE among
different participating users, it is of great importance
to dynamically balance the tradeoff performance be-
tween delay and energy consumption according to the
specific requirements of users.
Recently, the delay-energy tradeoff in wireless
networks has been extensively studied [5, 17-19].
Through investigating the existing research, we find
that several critical limitations still remain to be solved
in practical MEC-based offloading applications. First,
most existing research considers fixed delay-energy
tradeoff services for users under specific requirements
scenarios. In reality, users always have different tasks
that correspond to various requirements for delay and
energy consumption. Meanwhile, most studies focus
on minimizing the weighted sum of processing delay
of the task and energy consumption of the device, but
the units and dimensions of time and energy are quite
different. A simple weighted combination of delay and
energy consumption cannot reflect the specific prefer-
ences of individual users. Second, the related tech-
niques adopt binary offloading mode, and there are
few works considering a more practical partial offload-
ing mode. Given this background, how to adaptively
and fairly balance the tradeoff requirement by adopt-
ing partial offloading mode in MEC networks is a chal-
lenging open problem, and therefore is the focus of
this paper.
In this paper, motivated by the above, we pro-
pose and analyze a practical MEC-based requirement-
adaptive partial offloading system. We first introduce
two normalized parameters and a control weight to
fairly balance each user i’s preference to delay and
energy consumption. Then the computation over-
head of processing user i’s tasks is defined as the
sum of weighted parameters. The weighted value is
determined by user i according to his/her preference
for energy saving relative to delay reduction. Based
on these, we aim to provide a unique computation
offloading strategy regarding delay and energy con-
of
sumption for each user’s tasks, thus minimizing the
computation overheads of processing tasks. In this
context, we aim to design the optimal partial offload-
ro
ing MEC solution to satisfy dynamic delay-energy
balanced requirements and address the following two
-p
questions: 1) What is the volume of the computation
tasks that should be offloaded? 2) How much offload-
ing power should be allocated to the offloading tasks?
Specifically, the main technical contributions of this
paper are as follows:
• We consider a requirement-adaptive partial of-
floading system based on MEC networks, and
propose a Delay-Energy Balanced Partial Of-
floading (DEB-PO) scheme. Our goal is to min-
imize computation overheads by jointly optimiz-
ing offloading workloads and offloading power
under tolerable delay constraints.
• Since the resulting optimization problem is non-
convex, we explore its layered structure and de-
couple it into two easily solvable subproblems,
namely, power allocation problem and workload
allocation problem. Then a low-complexity iter-
ative algorithm is presented to obtain an approxi-
mate offloading solution.
• By conducting exhaustive experimental simula-
tions, we verify the advantages of the proposed
DEB-PO scheme in terms of computation over-
head and the proposed scheme is shown to sig-
nificantly outperform the existing ones in [6], [8]
and [33].
The structure of the remainder of this paper is as
follows. Section 2 introduces the relevant state-of-
the-art research. Section 3 details the MEC-based
requirement-adaptive partial offloading system. In
Section 4, we introduce the DEB-PO scheme and de-
velop an iterative algorithm. In Section 5, we evaluate
our proposed scheme by experimental simulation. We
conclude and discuss the contributions of the paper in
Section 6.
Adaptive delay-energy balanced partial offloading strategy in mobile edge computing networks
2. Related work
MEC plays a significant role in the next-generation
wireless networks, and has recently gained tremen-
dous attention [20, 21]. With the popularity of IoT
applications, many complex and resource-hungry mo-
bile applications, such as connected vehicles, inter-
active gaming, and AR, will pose significant chal-
lenges on wireless network infrastructures [22, 23].
Given this background, MEC-based computation of-
floading is an important approach to enhance the QoE
of mobile users. By offloading computational applica-
tions to the network edge, MEC can support enormous
computation-intensive and delay-critical applications
for nearby users [24, 25].
In recent years, computation offloading in MEC-
based systems has been considered in [13, 26, 27]. Ini-
tially, researchers focused on minimizing the process-
ing delay of tasks or the energy consumption of de-
vices [28, 29]. In terms of delay reduction, the authors
in [30] proposed a delay-sensitive scheduling mech-
anism to meet the heterogeneous Quality-of-Service
(QoS) requirements of mobile users in MEC-based
computation offloading. In [28], the authors proposed
a computation offloading scheme to reduce users’ av-
re
erage offloading delay by jointly optimizing offload-
ing decision and resource allocation. Focusing on en-
lP
ergy saving, the authors in [31] proposed a multi-task
multi-access MEC system to minimize the total energy
consumption for completing all tasks subject to the de-
na
lay tolerance of each task. The authors in [32] inves-
tigated how to achieve an energy-efficient MEC-based
IoT network by maximizing the energy efficiency for
ur
offloading, while simultaneously satisfying the maxi-
mum tolerable delay constraints of IoT devices. The
aforementioned studies consider that all participating
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mobile users have a single goal of minimizing either
delay or energy consumption. Obviously, these solu-
tions do not address the more general scenario where
users may have both delay and energy consumption
requirements.
The tradeoff between service delay and energy con-
sumption in MEC-based computation offloading sys-
tems has been another important area of research [33].
In [17], the authors formulated a Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle (UAV) energy minimization problem and task
delay minimization problem in UAV-enabled MEC
systems. Furthermore, they derived a Pareto-optimal
solution to balance the tradeoff between delay and
UAV energy consumption. The authors in [16] pro-
posed a delay energy balanced task scheduling al-
gorithm to minimize the overall energy consumption
while reducing average service delay and delay jitter.
In [18], the authors formulated an average weighted
sum of energy consumption and execution delay min-
imization problem for a mobile device with the stabil-
ity of buffer queues and battery level as constraints.
Besides, a dynamic online tasks offloading strategy is
developed to modify the data backlogs of queues. In
3
[19], the authors designed a QoE model jointly con-
sidering service delay, energy consumption, and task
success rate. Then a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradi-
ents (DDPG) algorithm is adopted to obtain the solu-
tion of maximizing QoE. The above research consid-
ered fixed delay-energy tradeoff services for users. In
realistic social IoT networks, users will have a wide
range of requirements for delay and energy consump-
tion. Since the units and dimensions of time and en-
ergy are quite different, obviously a simple weighted
combination of delay and energy consumption can-
not accurately reflect users’ requirements. In view of
this situation, the authors in [34] aimed to maximize
the users’ task offloading gains, which were measured
by a weighted sum of reductions in task completion
time and energy consumption. The authors proposed
to normalize delay and energy consumption, and dy-
of
namically balance them according to users’ task re-
quirements. However, they considered the binary of-
ro
floading mode. Thus users have only two task process-
ing styles, i.e., perform them locally or offload them
entirely to MEC servers. To sum up, when both var-
-p
ious delay-energy balance requirements and flexible
offloading modes are considered, there remain several
open problems, which will be addressed in this paper.
3. MEC-based requirement-adaptive partial of-
floading system
In this section, we introduce our MEC-based
requirement-adaptive partial offloading system.
Specifically, we describe the network model, lo-
cal computing model, partial offloading, and edge
computing model. Based on these, we design a
requirement-adaptive computation overhead model
for computation offloading.
3.1. Network model
As shown in Fig. 1, we consider an illustrative
MEC-based partial offloading network model where
user i offloads its partial or complete computation
tasks to an AP. The AP is integrated with an MEC
server, thus it has plenty of computation and energy
resources. User i with limited computation and energy
resources has some computation-intensive and delay-
aware tasks to be completed. The computation tasks
of user i are characterized by (Li , Di ). Li is the total
number of bits to be processed. Di is the tolerable de-
lay, which means the tasks must be completed within
this time. We focus on partial offloading in this pa-
per. Similar to [6, 8-10, 17], it is assumed that the
computation tasks for each user i can be split arbitrar-
ily. Each subtask is end-independent and can be pro-
cessed in parallel. Thus, i’s computation tasks can be
partitioned into two parts with li and Li − li bits, and
the first part is locally computed in the user while the
second part is offloaded to the AP.
4 Shumei Liu, et al.

Table 1: List of Notations

Notations Definitions
User i AP with an integrated Li Computation tasks workload (in bits)
MEC server li Tasks workload by local computing
Computation Partial offloading Di Tolerable delay of user i’s tasks
Tasks Local computing hiA Channel power gain from user i to the AP
Ci CPU cycles required for computing one
bits task of user i
Computation tasks Local computing part Partial offloading part
fi Average CPU frequency of user i
ς Effective capacitance coefficient
Fig. 1: MEC-based partial computation offloading process riA , pi Offloading rate and offloading power
pmax
i Maximum transmission power of user i
B, nA Bandwidth and background noise
We consider a quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel CAP CPU cycles required for computing one
model, in which channels remain constant within each bits task at the AP
offloading process. Then, the channel power gain from fAP Average CPU frequency at the AP

of
user i to the AP is denoted by hiA . Since the AP per- γiE , γiD Normalized energy consumption and delay
forms real-time control signal interactions with its ser- Oi Computation overhead for processing user
viced users, so we further assume that the task infor-

ro
i’s tasks
mation and the instantaneous Channel State Informa- αi Control weight to reflect user i’s preference
tion (CSI) hiA are known by the AP. For ease of refer- δ, K Tolerance for convergence and maximum
ence, we list important notations in Table 1. -p
li0 , p0i
number of iterations
Feasible resource allocation solution
3.2. Local computing model
re
li (k), pi (k) Solution of kth iteration
As for the local computing at user i, we use Ci to li∗ , p∗i Optimal resource allocation solution
denote the number of Central Processing Unit (CPU) tiloc , tiAP
lP

Computing time for local computing and

cycles required for computing one bit tasks. Hence, edge computing
the total number of CPU cycles required for comput- Eiloc ,Eioff User i’s energy consumption for local
ing li bits is Ci li . We assume that fi is the average CPU computing and partial offloading
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frequency (in CPU cycles per second) of user i. Then, Ei Total energy consumption of user i
the total computing time used for local computing is
C i li
fi . Due to the delay limitation requirement of the
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computation tasks, the delay constraint of local com- power at the AP. Then the offloading energy consump-
puting at user i is given by tion of user i is given by
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C i li Li − li
tiloc = ≤ Di (1) Eioff = pi (4)
fi riA
Next, energy consumption for local computing in As for the edge computing at the AP MEC server,
user i is given by we use CAP and fAP to represent the number of re-
quired CPU cycles at the AP for computing 1-bit in-
Eiloc = ςCi li fi2 (2) put tasks and its average CPU frequency, respectively.
The time consumption at the AP is
where ς > 0 is the effective capacitance coefficient
that depends on the chip architecture of user i. C AP (Li − li )
tiAP = (5)
fAP
3.3. Partial offloading and edge computing model
Apart from local computing, user i can offload the To meet the delay limitation of user i’s computation
remaining computation tasks to the AP for computing. tasks, the delay constraint of edge computing at the
According to the principles of Shannon’s channel ca- AP is defined as
pacity theory [35], the offloading rate riA from user i L i − li
to the AP can be characterized as tiAP + ≤ Di (6)
riA
!
pi hiA
riA = Blog2 1 + (3) 3.4. Requirement-adaptive computation overhead
nA
model
where B denotes the channel bandwidth, pi denotes As we know, energy saving and delay reduction are
the transmission power in user i for offloading the par- two basic user requirements in MEC-based computa-
tial computation tasks, and nA is the background noise tion offloading systems. For energy consumption, we
Adaptive delay-energy balanced partial offloading strategy in mobile edge computing networks
focus on the user perspective, since the MEC server
is typically powered by grid energy and therefore has
sufficient energy resources. The consumed energy of
each user can be expressed in two parts given by local
computing and partial computation offloading. Based
on (2) and (4), the total energy consumption Ei of user
i using the partial offloading mode is given by
Ei = Eiloc + Eioff
Li − li
= ςCi li fi2 + pi
riA
If user i does not offload the partial computation
tasks to the AP, the total energy consumption Eiall−loc
can be calculated as
Eiall−loc = ςCi Li fi2
As mentioned before, most existing MEC-based
computation offloading works on delay-energy bal-
ance directly perform a weighted sum of delay and en-
ergy consumption, and aim to minimize the sum. But
the units and dimensions of time and energy are quite
different. A simple weighted combination cannot pro-
vide users with a preference index to fairly balance
delay and power consumption. In realistic IoT net-
re
works, users tend to have various demands for delay
reduction and energy saving. Therefore, it is necessary
lP
to address the dimensional differences between time
and energy and provide on-demand services. To this
end, we introduce a normalized energy consumption
γiE and a normalized delay γiD for user i when using
na
partial computation offloading, which are given by
Ei
γiE =
ur
all−loc
Ei
 
max tiloc , tiAP + Li −li
Jo
riA
γiD = , γiD ≤ 1 (10)
Di
where γiD should be less than or equal to one to sat-
isfy the user i’s delay limitation for the computation
tasks. As such, γiE and γiD can intuitively reflect the
degrees of energy saving and delay reduction due to
partial computation offloading, respectively.
Based on γiE and γiD , we then define the computa-
tion overhead of processing user i’s tasks as
Oi = αi γiE + (1 − αi )γiD
where 0 ≤ αi ≤ 1 is a control weight, and its value
is decided by user i according to its own computation
tasks requirements. The offloading decisions can be
greatly affected by αi . To meet user-specific demands,
we allow each user to assign their own weights when
they make decision. To illustrate this, we present the
following three-user example:
• User 1 has some delay-sensitive computation
tasks, thus he/she places a higher priority on
his/her tasks’ delay than energy consumption.
Then, he/she sets 0 ≤ α1 < 21 , and α1 = 0 is
the problem of minimizing delay [6];
5
• User 2 places an equal priority on energy con-
sumption and delay, thus he/she sets α2 = 12 since
both the energy consumption and delay should be
minimized;
• User 3 has some energy-intensive computation
tasks, but the device is in a low battery state,
thus he/she places a higher priority on his/her en-
(7) ergy consumption than delay. Then, he/she sets
2 < α3 ≤ 1, and α3 = 1 means that the goal is to
1
minimize energy consumption while meeting the
delay constraint [8].
We highlight that each user i can adaptively adjust
(8) their own weight value αi according to their task re-
quirements and device status. We consider that the
of
style of “user decision" in this paper is reasonable and
necessary. This is generally because different users
ro
have diverse computation tasks, and each user’s tasks
at different periods may be quite different. More im-
portantly, even for the same tasks at the same period,
-p
different users will have widely varying task prefer-
ences due to differences in individual habits and the
current status of the holding devices. A user with a
low battery device can choose a larger αi to save more
energy. Another user running delay-sensitive applica-
tions (e.g., online movies) may prefer to set a smaller
αi to reduce the delay. As such, our approach can im-
prove the QoE of all participating users.
(9)
4. Proposed delay-energy balanced partial offload-
ing scheme
In this section, we propose a DEB-PO scheme to
provide a specific offloading strategy for user i’s cur-
rent tasks. Specifically, we first formulate an optimiza-
tion problem to minimize computation overheads un-
der various constraints. Since the resulting problem is
non-convex, we explore its layered structure and de-
couple it into two subproblems. Finally, we develop
(11) an iterative algorithm to obtain the offloading solution.
4.1. Problem formulation and equivalent transforma-
tion
Our goal is to provide computation offloading so-
lutions for participating users according to their pref-
erence requirements. Specifically, we aim to find an
optimal allocation decision set {pi , li } for user i’s com-
putation tasks, minimizing computation overhead Oi .
Then, based on equations (1)-(11), the optimization
6 Shumei Liu, et al.

problem can be formulated as • Power allocation problem

(P1): min Oi = αi γiE + (1 − αi )γiD First, for a given offloading workload li , problem
pi ,li (P2) becomes a power allocation problem with respect
 αi li αi pi (Li − li ) to variable pi . Next, we introduce the first-layer opti-

= min  + mization under a given feasible li0 .
pi ,li Li ςCi Li fi2 riA
First-Layer Optimization: Given li0 satisfying 0 ≤
(1 − αi ) max(tiloc , tiAP + Li −li 
riA )  li ≤ min( DCi ifi , Li ) (i.e., the equivalent transformation
0

+ 
 (12a)
Di of (12b) and (12d)), the first subproblem (P2-1) is ex-
pressed as
s.t. tiloc ≤ Di (12b)
 αi li αi (Li − li0 )pi (1 − αi )zi 
 0 
Li − li
tiAP + ≤ Di (12c) (P2-1): min  + +  (16a)
ςCi Li fi2 riA

riA pi ,zi Li Di
0 ≤ li ≤ L i (12d) Ci li0
s.t. ≤ zi ≤ Di (16b)
0 ≤ pi ≤ pmax
i (12e) fi
C AP (Li − li0 ) Li − li0
where (12b) and (12c) satisfy the delay limitation Di , zi ≥ + (16c)
fAP riA

of
(12d) ensures the offloading size limit, and (12e) re- max
stricts the transmission power of user i. pmax is the 0 ≤ pi ≤ pi (16d)
i
maximum transmission power of user i. Problem (P1)

is a non-convex problem due to the coupling of vari-
ables, which belongs to an NP-hard problem and trou-
blesome to find the optimal solution by employing
traditional optimization methods. Before solving the
nonconvexity, we introduce an auxiliary variable zi as
∆ Li − li
zi = max(tiloc , tiAP +
lP
ro
Note that the problem (P2-1) is still non-convex be-
cause the term rpiAi in objective function (15a) is non-
convex with respect to pi . Let f (pi ) = rpiAi , and we then
-p
convert f (pi ) into a convex term by using Successive
Convex Approximation (SCA) [36]. We specifically
re
introduce the following Lemma for non-convex gradi-
ent approximations from [37].
) (13)

riA Lemma 1. If no convexity is present in U(x), we can

apply proximal-gradient methods for equivalent con-
Based on zi , equation (11) can be written as
vex transformation, i.e., first order approximation.
na

ei = αi li + αi (Li − li )pi + (1 − αi )zi

Hence, for any y in the domain of U, a convex ap-
O (14) proximation Ũ(x; y) of U(x) can be written as
Li ςCi Li fi2 riA Di
∆ τ
Ũ(x; y) = ∇ x U(y)(x − y) + (x − y)2
ur

Then, based on zi and (14), problem (P1) can be (17)

2
transformed as
where τ > 0 is a positive constant. ∇ x U(y) denotes
Jo

(P2): min O
ei (15a) the partial gradient of U with respect to argument x
pi ,li ,zi evaluated at y.
s.t. tiloc ≤ zi ≤ Di (15b)
Based on Lemma 1, a convex approximation
Li − li f (pi ; pi (k)) of f (pi ) can be written as
zi ≥ tiAP + (15c)
riA  τ 
0 ≤ li ≤ Li (15d) f (pi ; pi (k)) = B f 0 (pi (k))(pi − pi (k)) + (pi − pi (k))2
2
0 ≤ pi ≤ pmax
i (15e) (18)
log2 ( nA +pniA(k)hiA ) − pi (k) (nA +pih(k)h
iA
iA )ln2
where (15b) and (15c) are the equivalent form of (12b) f 0 (pi (k)) =
nA +pi hiA 2
 
and (12c), respectively. However, problem (P2) is still log2 ( nA )
a non-convex optimization problem because objective (19)
function (15a) and constraint (15c) are non-convex. where τ > 0 is a positive constant, and pi (k) is the
solution of the kth iteration in subproblem (P2-1).
4.2. Layered structure of problem (P2) Based on equations (18) and (19), we approxi-
mately transform problem (P2-1) into a convex prob-
Fortunately, it is evident from problem (P2) that lem (P2-1*) as
once the offloading power pi is determined, the op-
 αi l αi (Li − li0 )
 0
timization problem is a general convex problem. In- (P2-1*): min  i + f (pi ; pi (k))
spired by this idea, in this section, we explore the lay- pi ,zi Li ςCi Li fi2
ered structure of problem (P1) to efficiently solve it. (1 − αi )zi
!
Specifically, we build a two-layer structure and decou- + (20)
Di
ple it into a power allocation problem and a workload
allocation problem. s.t. (16b), (16c), (16d)
Adaptive delay-energy balanced partial offloading strategy in mobile edge computing networks 7

Problem (P2-1) is convex, and can be solved by Algorithm 2 Optimal Resource Allocation Algorithm
CVX. To facilitate the understanding, we develop an for Solving P2
iterative power allocation algorithm for solving P2-1*, Input:
which is shown in Algorithm 1. δ: tolerance for convergence
K: maximum number of iterations
Algorithm 1 Power Allocation Algorithm for Solving Output:
P2-1* (li∗ , p∗i ): optimal allocation strategy
Input: 1: Initialize: k2 = 1, O e(0) = −δ and |O e(k2 −1) | =
e(k2 ) − O
i
δ: tolerance for convergence 2δ;
K: maximum number of iterations 2: while |O e(k2 −1) | > δ and k2 ≤ K do
e(k2 ) − O
li0 : feasible partial offloading size 3: k2 = k2 + 1
p0i : feasible power allocation solution 4: Given feasible partial offloading size li (k2 ), per-
Output: form Algorithm 1 to update pi (k2 ) = p∗i ;
p∗i : optimal power allocation strategy 5: Based on pi (k2 ), solve problem (P2-2) by using
1: Initialize: k1 = 1, pi (0) = −δ, |pi (k1 ) − CVX to update li (k2 );
pi (k1 − 1)| = 2δ and pi (k1 − 1) = p0i ; 6: end while
2: while |pi (k1 ) − pi (k1 − 1)| > δ and k1 ≤ K do 7: Return p∗i and li∗ = li (k2 )

of
3: Solve problem (P2-1*) based on li0 and pi (k1 −
1) by using CVX and obtain power allocation

ro
pi (k1 ); (P2-2). Then, we present an optimal resource allo-
4: k1 = k1 + 1 cation algorithm for solving (P2), and the algorithm
5: end while
6: Return p∗i = pi (k1 )
-p
process is summarized in Algorithm 2.
In Algorithm 2, δ and K are the tolerance for con-
vergence (i.e., the desired accuracy) and the maximum
re
In Algorithm 1, δ and K are the tolerance for con- number of iterations, respectively. We iteratively ap-
vergence and the maximum number of iterations, re- proximate the optimal solution until the termination
lP

condition is satisfied, i.e., |O e(k2 −1) | ≤ δ or

e(k2 ) − O
spectively. We iteratively approximate the optimal
solution until the termination condition is met, i.e., k2 > K, where O e(k2 ) is the objective value of the k2 th
|pi (k1 ) − pi (k1 − 1)| ≤ δ or k1 > K. iteration, and li∗ and p∗i are optimal partial offloading
na

workload and offloading power of user i’s computation

• Workload allocation problem tasks.
Complexity analysis: The complexity of Algorithm
Second, for a given offloading power pi , problem
ur

2 is theoretically analyzed as follows. As men-

(P2) becomes a workload allocation problem with tioned above, through the proposed two-layer opti-
respect to variable li . Next, we will introduce the mization algorithm, problem (P2) can be decomposed
Jo

second-layer optimization under a given feasible p0i . into the inter power allocation problem (P2-1*) and
Second-Layer Optimization: Given p0i satisfying the outer workload allocation problem (P2-2). Both
p0 h
 
0 ≤ p0i ≤ pmax i (i.e., (14e)), riA 0
= Blog2 1 + ni AiA (P2-1*) and (P2-2) are convex optimization problems,
and the second subproblem (P2-2) is expressed as and are solved by the interior point method of CVX
toolkit. Therefore, the overall complexity of solv-
 αi li αi (Li − li )p0i (1 − αi )zi 
 
ing problem (P2) in Algorithm 2 can be written as
(P2-2) : min  + +
ςCi Li fi2 riA O((K1 log( 1δ ))(K2 log( 1δ ))), where K1 and K2 are respec-
 0

li ,zi Li Di
(21a) tively the iteration number of solving problems (P2-
C i li 1*) and (P2-2) using CVX, and δ denotes the accu-
s.t. ≤ zi ≤ Di (21b) racy required for the convergence of Algorithms 1 and
fi
2. Therefore, our proposed Algorithm 2 can solve the
C AP (Li − li ) Li − li
zi ≥ + 0 (21c) formulated non-convex problem in polynomial time
fAP riA complexity.
In problem (P2-2), both the objective function and
constraints are convex with respect to li and zi . There- 5. Performance evaluation
fore, problem (P2-2) is a convex problem, and can be
easily solved by CVX. In this section, we evaluate the performance of the
proposed DEB-PO scheme via extensive numerical
experiments. All the experiments are implemented in
4.3. An iterative algorithm for offloading solution
MATLAB using CVX on a desktop computer with an
Based on the above problem decomposition, the Intel Core i7-4790 3.60GHz CPU and 16GB RAM.
original non-convex problem (P2) is approximately The simulation parameters settings are summarized in
transformed into two convex problems (P2-1*) and Table 2 unless otherwise stated.
8 Shumei Liu, et al.
Table 2: Simulation Parameter Settings
Parameters
Maximum number of iterations: K
Tolerance for convergence: δ
Channel bandwidth: B
Channel power gain: hiA
Background noise at AP: nA
CPU cycles of user i: Ci
CPU cycles of AP: CAP
Maximum transmission power: pmax
i 2W
Average CPU frequency of user i: fi
Average CPU frequency of AP: fAP
In the following simulation experiments, we use L,
D and ς to describe the characteristics of various com-
putation tasks belonging to different users. Amongst,
Li is the workload of the computation tasks required
by user i, Di is the tolerable delay of i’s tasks, and
ς is the effective capacitance coefficient of i’s device.
A larger ς represents the more energy consumed by
computing one bit of tasks.
5.1. Convergence analysis
0.5
0.45
na
0.4
Computation overhead
0.35
0.3
ur
0.25 DEB-PO scheme with α =0.4
0.2 DEB-PO scheme with α =0.5
0.15 DEB-PO scheme with α =0.6
Jo
0.1
0.05
0 for user i because he/she sets αi = 0.3 < 0.5. Fig. 3
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Number of iterations
Fig. 2: Convergence of the proposed DEB-PO scheme
In this subsection, we verify the convergence of
the proposed Algorithm 2 for the DEB-PO scheme,
shown in Fig. 2. In this case, we set Li = 3 × 106 bits,
Di = 0.5s and ς = 10−27 to describe the current tasks
of user i. From Fig. 2, we can see that the computa-
tion overhead increases significantly with the number
of iterations in the DEB-PO schemes with three differ-
ent values of α, and the optimal computation overhead
is achieved within 13 iterations at most. Therefore,
the proposed Algorithm 2 for the DEB-PO scheme
converges to a stable value with a fast convergence
speed, thus verifying the convergence and feasibility
of our solution. Moreover, we observe that the com-
putation overhead in DEB-PO increases with increas-
ing α value. That is, greater attention to energy con-
sumption achieves less computational overhead in this
case. This phenomenon can conclude that the tasks
with the above settings of Li , Di , and ς are relatively
Values more energy-consuming.
50
0.0001 5.2. Performance comparison
20MHz In this subsection, we evaluate the performance of
2.5×10−7 DEB-PO in terms of computation overhead of pro-
-43dbm
cessing tasks. To verify the advantages of our pro-
posed scheme, we compare our solution with the exist-
100 cycles/bit
ing partial offloading schemes configured as follows:
100 cycles/bit
(1) Delay Minimization Partial Offloading (DMPO):
This scheme is derived by modifying the offload-
1GHz ing method in [6]. In this scheme, user i adopts
3GHz partial offloading mode in the MEC-based sys-
tem, and the AP aims to provide solutions with
minimum delay for user i’s tasks.
(2) Energy consumption Minimization Partial Of-
of
floading (EMPO): This scheme is derived from
the offloading method in [8]. In this scheme, user
ro
i also adopts partial offloading mode in the MEC-
based system, and the AP aims to provide solu-
tions with minimum energy consumption for user
-p i’s tasks.
(3) Delay-Energy Tradeoff Partial Offloading
re
(DETPO): This scheme is derived from the of-
floading method in [33]. In this scheme, user i
lP
also adopts partial offloading mode in the MEC-
based system, and the AP aims to provide solu-
tions with the minimum weighted sum of delay
and energy consumption for user i’s tasks. (For
a fair comparison, in each simulation experiment,
we give the same tradeoff weight for the DETPO
scheme as the preference weight αi in our pro-
posed DEB-PO scheme.)
First, we set αi = 0.3, Li = 3 × 106 bits and
ς = 10−27 to describe the characteristics of user i’s
current tasks. Obviously, the tasks are delay-sensitive
14 16 18
shows the computation overhead Oi to process user
i’s tasks changing with the tasks’ tolerable delay Di .
We find that EMPO has the worst performance among
the above four schemes. This is because the tasks are
delay-sensitive, but EMPO only focuses on minimiz-
ing i’s energy consumption without considering pro-
cessing delay, which increases the computational over-
head of processing the tasks. Moreover, it can be ob-
served that the computation overhead decreases with
increasing tolerable delay Di for DEB-PO, DETPO
and DMPO, while EMPO shows an increasing trend.
We next analyze the reason for this phenomenon. The
EMPO scheme aims to minimize energy consumption
by offloading more tasks and allocating less offload
power. When task workload Li is constant, a larger
tolerable delay Di in EMPO leads to larger offloading
part and smaller offloading power, which in turn re-
sults in longer processing and offloading delays. Con-
versely, DEB-PO, DETPO and DMPO achieve lower
processing and offloading delays due to giving more
Adaptive delay-energy balanced partial offloading strategy in mobile edge computing networks
focuses on minimizing delay than EMPO. Therefore,
we conclude that for delay-sensitive tasks, the solu-
tion of minimizing energy consumption increases the
computational overhead of processing the tasks.
0.7
0.6
Computation overhead
0.5 Our proposed DEB-PO scheme
DMPO scheme
EMPO scheme
0.4
DETPO scheme
0.3
0.2
0.1
0.35 0.45 0.55 0.65 0.75 0.85
Tolerable delay (s)
Fig. 3: Computation overhead versus tolerable delay
Furthermore, it is obvious in Fig. 3 that our pro-
posed DEB-PO scheme outperforms the DETPO,
DMPO, and EMPO schemes. First, the reason for the
improvement to DETPO is that in DEB-PO we design
two normalized parameters for delay and energy con-
lP
sumption, which can flexibly balance user i’s prefer-
ence regarding the degrees of energy saving and de-
lay reduction. But DETPO only considers a simple
na
weighted combination of delay and energy consump-
tion. The units and dimensions of time and energy
are quite different, and a simple weighted combina-
ur
tion cannot reflect the specific preferences to delay re-
duction and energy saving for individual users. As
such, DETPO exhibits a larger computational over-
Jo
head than our proposed DEB-PO scheme. Second, the
reason for the improvement to DMPO and EMPO is
that DEB-PO can accommodate i’s requirement pref-
erence, while DMPO and EMPO can only provide a
fixed strategy of minimizing delay or energy consump-
tion. When αi = 0.3, our proposed DEB-PO scheme
pays more attention to the delay reduction compared
to the energy saving for user i’s tasks. In other words,
instead of ignoring energy saving as DMPO, we give
energy consumption relatively low attention. DMPO
and EMPO schemes default to αi = 0 and αi = 1, re-
spectively. Thus they display a larger computational
overhead than do DEB-PO and DETPO.
Next, we set αi = 0.8, Di = 0.9s, ς = 2∗10−27 to de-
scribe the characteristics of user i’s current tasks. This
describes user i having energy-intensive tasks or the
residual energy of his/her device is low due to the set-
ting of αi = 0.8 > 0.5 and ς = 2 ∗ 10−27 . Fig. 4 shows
the computation overhead Oi of processing user i’s
tasks changing with the task workload Li . This figure
shows that the computation overhead increases with
increasing task workload for DEB-PO, DETPO and
DMPO because of the positive correlation between
9
the computation overhead and the task workload in
these schemes. Meanwhile, the computation overhead
in EMPO increases at first and then decreases with
increasing computation task workload. This is be-
cause EMPO aims to offload as much task workload
as possible to MEC for processing, thereby minimiz-
ing i’s energy consumption. When the task workload
is relatively small, as the workload increases, the so-
lution for EMPO increases task delay, and meanwhile
contributes a small reduction to energy consumption
due to the consumption of offloading energy. With
a larger task workload, the solution for EMPO con-
tributes larger reduction both in delay and energy con-
sumption. For the above reasons, the trend line of the
EMPO scheme in Fig. 4 increases first and then de-
creases.
of
0.95
0.6
ro
0.5
Computation overhead
Our proposed DEB-PO scheme
0.4
-p 0.3
DMPO scheme
EMPO scheme
DETPO scheme
re
0.2
0.1
0
1 1.25 1.5 1.75 2 2.25 2.5 2.75 3 3.25 3.5 3.75 4
×106
Computation task workload (bits)
Fig. 4: Computation overhead versus computation task workload
Moreover, we observe from Fig. 4 that EMPO per-
forms far better than the DMPO scheme because the
current tasks are energy-intensive for user i’s device.
In DMPO, to rigidly provide low-delay service for
user i, the offloading solution forces part of the tasks
to be computed locally, which consumes more en-
ergy of user i and increases the computation overhead.
We further find that DETPO outperforms DMPO and
EMPO. This is because DETPO sets a weight factor
and then achieves the tradeoff of delay and energy
consumption, but DMPO and EMPO can only provide
a fixed strategy of minimizing delay or energy con-
sumption. More importantly, our proposed DEB-PO
scheme outperforms DETPO, and performs far better
than DMPO and EMPO. The reason for the improve-
ment to DETPO is the same as that in Fig. 3. The
reason for the improvement to DMPO and EMPO is
that user i is not completely ignoring the processing
delay of current tasks, but the delay reduction is of
relatively low concern compared to energy saving. As
such, he/she does not set αi = 1 as EMPO. Therefore,
DEB-PO always provides a specific offloading solu-
tion based on each user’s requirement preference.
Next, we evaluate the performance of DEB-PO with
different preference degrees on energy consumption
10 Shumei Liu, et al.

0.7
forms the other schemes. This is because DEB-PO not
only focuses on the balance service between delay and
0.6 energy consumption but also considers the users’ em-
phasis degrees on delay reduction and energy saving.
Computation overhead

0.5
Moreover, the EMPO scheme has better performance
0.4 than DMPO because relatively more users think that
the tasks with the above settings of L, D and ς are
0.3
energy-consuming, further supporting the conclusion
0.2 Our proposed DEB-PO scheme in Fig. 2.
DMPO scheme Based on the above analysis, we can conclude that
0.1 EMPO scheme
DETPO scheme
it is of great significance to develop our correspond-
0 ing offloading solution according to the specific pref-
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
erence of each user. Our balanced approach is effec-
The value of α assigned by the user
tive in reducing computation overheads and thus im-
Fig. 5: Computation overhead versus the value of αi proving the QoE of mobile users.

(i.e., the value of αi ). The settings of L, D and ς are

of
6. Conclusion
the same as those in Fig. 2. Fig. 5 shows the compu-
tation overhead Oi of processing user i’s tasks chang- Recently, IoT and MEC networks are promising

ro
ing with the value of αi . Obviously, the DEB-PO and technologies for supporting ubiquitous services to
DETPO schemes are equivalent to the DMPO scheme large numbers of mobile users. Based on this, a
when αi = 0, and equivalent to the EMPO scheme
when αi = 1. We also observe that our proposed DEB-
PO schemes always achieve a lower computation over-
-p
large number of computation-sensitive social applica-
tions have emerged. Computational offloading is re-
garded as a critical solution for the ever-increasing re-
re
head than do other schemes regardless of the value of quirements of energy-intensive and delay-critical ap-
αi . This is because DEB-PO always accommodates plications. Unfortunately, most existing research can
lP

the varying requirements of users regarding delay re- only provide rigid offloading services. To this end,
duction and energy saving, and then provides a unique we design a requirement-adaptive MEC-based par-
strategy for each user’s specific requirement. tial offloading system. Specifically, we propose a
na

Delay-Energy Balanced Partial Offloading (DEB-PO)

45
scheme and formulate the corresponding optimization
Our proposed DEB-PO scheme problem, which aims to minimize the total compu-
40
ur

DMPO scheme tation overhead of processing tasks subject to tolera-

35 EMPO scheme
ble delay, task workloads, and power constraints. To
Computation overhead

DETPO scheme
30 tackle the original non-convex problem, we decouple
Jo

25 it into two subproblems, and develop an efficient itera-

20
15
10
5
0
10 20 30 40
The number of users
Fig. 6: Computation overhead versus the number of users
Finally, we verify the advantages of our proposed
DEB-PO scheme when there are multiple participat-
ing users in the MEC-based offloading system, and
the settings of L, D and ς are the same as those in
Fig. 2. We aim to reflect the positive impact of con-
sidering each user’s specific preference. The αi value
of each user i is randomly generated between 0 and
1, which can reflect the preferences of different users
for the energy consumption of the current tasks. Fig.
6 shows the computation overhead Oi of processing
users’ tasks changing with the number of users. We
observe that our proposed DEB-PO scheme outper-
tive algorithm to obtain suboptimal solutions. Finally,
we conduct extensive simulation experiments, and it is
verified that our proposed DEB-PO scheme provides
better performance than the baseline schemes.
50 60 70 80 90 100
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 Conflict of interest statement

We declare that we have no conflicts of interest to this work.

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