Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous Edge Environments

Mobile edge computing has emerged as a prevalent computing paradigm to support applications that demand low latency and high computational capacity. Hardware reconfigurable accelerators exhibit high energy efficiency and low latency compared to general-purpose servers, making them ideal for integration into mobile edge computing systems. This article investigates the problem of joint task offloading, access point selection, and resource allocation in heterogeneous edge environments for latency minimization. Given the heterogeneity of edge computing devices and the interdependence of the decisions required for offloading, access point selection, and resource allocation, it is challenging to optimize over them simultaneously. We decomposed the proposed problem into two disjoint subproblems and developed algorithms for each of them. The first subproblem is to jointly determine access point selection and communication resource allocation decisions, for which we have proposed an algorithm with a provable approximation ratio of 2.62/(1-8λ), where λ is a tunable parameter balancing the approximation ratio and time complexity. Additionally, we offer a faster variant of the algorithm with an approximation ratio of (√(3+1))2). The second subproblem is to determine offloading and computing resource allocation decisions jointly and is NP-hard, where we developed algorithms based on relaxation and rounding. We conducted comprehensive numerical simulations to evaluate the proposed algorithms, and the results demonstrated that our algorithms outperformed existing baselines and achieved near-optimal performance across various settings.