Data Sharing-Aware Task Allocation in Edge Computing Systems

Abstract

Edge computing allows end-user devices to offload heavy computation to nearby edge servers for reduced latency, maximized profit, and/or minimized energy consumption. Data-dependent tasks that analyze locally-acquired sensing data are one of the most common candidates for task offloading in edge computing. As a result, the total latency and network load are affected by the total amount of data transferred from end-user devices to the selected edge servers. Most existing solutions for task allocation in edge computing do not take into consideration that some user tasks may actually operate on the same data items. Making the task allocation algorithm aware of the existing data sharing characteristics of tasks can help reduce network load at a negligible profit loss by allocating more tasks sharing data on the same server. In this paper, we formulate the data sharing-aware task allocation problem that make decisions on task allocation for maximized profit and minimized network load by taking into account the data-sharing characteristics of tasks. In addition, because the problem is NP-hard, we design the DSTA algorithm, which finds a solution to the problem in polynomial time. We analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm against a state-of-the-art baseline that only maximizes profit. Our extensive analysis shows that DSTA leads to about 8 times lower data load on the network while being within 1.03 times of the total profit on average compared to the state-of-the-art.