Computation Offloading for Frame-Based Real-Time Tasks with Resource Reservation Servers

Abstract

Computation offloading concept has been recently adopted to improve the performance of embedded systems by moving some computation-intensive tasks (partially or wholly) to a powerful remote server. In this paper, we consider a computation offloading problem for frame-based real-time tasks, in which all the tasks have the same arrival time and the same relative deadline/period, by adopting the total bandwidth server (TBS) as resource reservations in the server side (remote execution unit). We prove that the problem is N P-complete and propose two algorithms in this paper. The first algorithm is a greedy algorithm with low complexity and provides a quick heuristic approach to decide which tasks to be offloaded and how the tasks are scheduled. The maximum finishing time of the solution derived from the greedy algorithm is at most twice of the finishing time (make span, maximal on the client and on the server) of any schedule. The second algorithm is a dynamic programming approach, which builds a three-dimensional table and requires pseudo-polynomial time complexity, to make an optimal decision for computation offloading. The algorithms are evaluated with a case study of a surveillance system and synthesized benchmarks.