Energy-efficient allocation for multiple tasks in mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) allows a mobile device to offload tasks to the nearby server for remote execution to enhance the performance of user equipment. A major challenge of MEC is to design an efficient algorithm for task allocation. In contrast to previous work on MEC, which mainly focuses on single-task allocation for a mobile device with only one task to be completed, this paper considers a mobile device with multiple tasks or an application with multiple tasks. This assumption does not hold in real settings because a mobile device may have multiple tasks waiting to execute. We address the problem of task allocation with minimum total energy consumption considering multi-task settings in MEC, in which a mobile device has one or more tasks. We consider the binary computation offloading mode and formulate multi-task allocation as an integer programming problem that is strongly NP-hard. We propose an approximation algorithm and show it is a polynomial-time approximation scheme that saves the maximum energy. Therefore, our proposed algorithm achieves a tradeoff between optimality loss and time complexity. We analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm by performing extensive experiments. The results of the experiments demonstrate that our proposed approximation algorithm is capable of finding near-optimal solutions, and achieves a good balance of speed and quality.