Time Fairness-Based Application Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing with Individual QoS Guarantee

In the area of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), how to offload applications with QoS and fairness guarantees has been attracting increasing attention. Most existing application offloading strategies focus on reducing the average completion time of the applications to fulfill the global QoS requirement. However, when there are a huge number of mobile users for the applications, these strategies cannot guarantee the QoS for the individual users; therefore, the mobile users’ experiences differ significantly, resulting in unfairness among the users. To address this problem, this paper presents a time fairness-based application offloading strategy for individual mobile users with individual QoS guarantees. This strategy is designed to achieve two primary objectives. Firstly, it seeks to assess the suitability of offloading each application to edge servers by evaluating its completion time, aiming to maximize the number of applications meeting individual QoS time requirements. Secondly, for applications that meet individual QoS time requirements, this strategy ensures time fairness among multiple users by minimizing the variance between application completion times and individual QoS time requirements. The empirical validation presented in this paper provides robust evidence of the effectiveness of our strategy, surpassing existing approaches, with a particular emphasis on achieving time fairness.

I. Introduction

With the rapid development of mobile internet, mobile devices including laptops, cellphones, smartwatches, etc have been broadly applied to our daily life. Nowadays, mobile devices are becoming increasingly powerful in terms of computing capabilities [1], [2], they are, however, still not able to support computing-intensive applications such as virtual reality [3]. To cope with the problems of insufficient computing capacity and limited resources of mobile devices, mobile edge computing (MEC) has been introduced to the industry where mobile computing tasks can be offloaded to the edge services for pocessing [4]–[6].