Improving Offload Delay using Flow Splitting and Aggregation in Edge Computing

Edge computing, which locates edge servers with limited computing and storage resources at the edge of networks, is expected as a novel architecture for low-latency applications. In edge computing, users offload a task to edge servers due to poor computing resources and batteries of mobile devices so that the edge servers execute the offloaded task and return the result of it to users. Users can thus enjoy various applications without depending on the limitations of mobile devices. However, when the edge server’s load is too heavy, a large number of tasks will be offloaded to distant cloud servers. The long distance between users and cloud servers significantly degrades the quality of mobile applications. To prevent this problem, we propose flow splitting and aggregation schemes to improve offload delay to cloud servers in edge computing. This scheme splits TCP connections between users and cloud servers at the edge server, and then aggregates TCP connections between the edge server and cloud servers. We show the effectiveness of our scheme through simulation evaluations.