DAG Scheduling in Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

In Mobile Edge Computing, edge servers have limited storage and computing resources which can only support a small number of functions. Meanwhile, mobile applications are becoming more complex, consisting of multiple dependent tasks, modeled as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). When a request arrives, typically in an online manner with a deadline specified, we need to configure the servers and assign the dependent tasks for efficient processing. This work jointly considers the problem of dependent task placement and scheduling with on-demand function configuration on edge servers, aiming to meet as many deadlines as possible. For a single request, when the configuration on each edge server is fixed, we derive FixDoc to find the optimal task placement and scheduling. When the on-demand function configuration is allowed, we propose GenDoc, a novel approximation algorithm, and analyze its additive error from the optimal theoretically. For multiple requests, we derive OnDoc, an online algorithm easy to deploy in practice. Our extensive experiments show that GenDoc outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in processing 86.14% of these unique applications, and reduces their average completion time by at least 24%. The number of deadlines that OnDoc can satisfy is at least1.9 × of that of the baselines.