Mobility-Aware Task Offloading Scheme for 6G Networks With Temporal Graph and Graph Matching

New services, such as extended reality (XR) and holographic communication in the future 6G era, will require a lot of computing power. With the increasing trend of terminal mobility, research on traditional task offloading problems in the mobile-edge computing (MEC) paradigm needs to be extended from quasi-static scenarios to mobile scenarios. In this article, we focus on the problem of mobility-aware task offloading with dependency guarantee. We have established a nonlinear integer programming task offloading problem that maximizes task utility by optimizing the task offloading decision while taking into account user mobility and subtask dependencies. Confronted with a dynamic user-centric service network, we use the temporal graph to characterize the dynamically changing set of offloading nodes including base stations surrounding the user and the terminal device. Then, we abstract the task offloading problem as a graph homomorphism problem, considering the task offloading decision is a one-to-many mapping relationship. To solve this problem, we have developed the optimized A*(star) algorithm (OASA) that incorporates the delayed offloading strategy and the serial offloading strategy, specifically designed for user mobility and task dependency. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms four benchmark algorithms in terms of three metrics.