We consider a Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) system with a set of users, a base station (BS) with an attached MEC server, and a cloud server. The users can serve the service requests locally or can offload them to the BS which in turn can serve a subset of the offloaded requests at the MEC and can forward the requests to the cloud server. The user devices and the MEC server can be dynamically configured to serve different classes of services. The service requests offloaded to the BS incur offloading costs and those forwarded to the cloud incur additional costs; the costs could represent service charges or delays. Aggregate cost minimization subject to stability warrants optimal service scheduling and offloading at the users and the MEC server, at their application layers, and optimal uplink packet scheduling at the users’ MAC layers. Classical back-pressure (BP) based solutions entail cross-layer message exchange, and hence are not viable. We propose virtual queue-based drift-plus-penalty algorithms that are throughput optimal, and achieve the optimal delay arbitrarily closely but do not require cross-layer communication. We first consider an MEC system without local computation, and subsequently, extend our framework to incorporate local computation also. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithms offer almost the same performance as BP based algorithms. These algorithms contain tuneable parameters that offer a trade off between queue lengths at the users and the BS and the offloading costs.
FlexRay is a high-bandwidth protocol that supports hard-deadline periodic and sporadic traffic in modern in-vehicle communication networks. The dynamic segment of FlexRay is used for transmitting hard deadline sporadic messages. In this paper, we describe an algorithm to minimize the duration of the dynamic segment in a FlexRay cycle, yielding better results than existing algorithms in the literature. The proposed algorithm consists of two phases. In the first phase, we assume that a sporadic message instance contends for service with only one instance of each higher-priority message. The lower bound provided by the first phase serves as the initial guess for the number of mini-slots used in the second phase, where an exact scheduling analysis is performed. In the second phase, a sporadic message may contend for service with multiple instances of each higher-priority message. This two-phase approach is efficient because the first phase has low overhead and its estimate greatly reduces the number of iterations needed in the second phase. We conducted experiments using the dataset provided in the literature as well as the SAE benchmark dataset. The experimental results demonstrate superior bandwidth minimization and computational efficiency compared to other algorithms.