Cloud-Edge-End Collaborative Intelligent Service Computation Offloading: A Digital Twin Driven Edge Coalition Approach for Industrial IoT

By using the intelligent edge computing technologies, a large number of computing tasks of end devices in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) can be offloaded to edge servers, which can effectively alleviate the burden and enhance the performance of IIoT. However, in large-scale multi-service-oriented IIoT scenarios, offloading service resources are heterogeneous and offloading requirements are mutually exclusive and time-varying, which reduce the offloading efficiency. In this paper, we propose a cloud-edge-end collaboration intelligent service computation offloading scheme based on Digital Twin (DT) driven Edge Coalition Formation (DECF) approach to improve the offloading efficiency and the total utility of edge servers, respectively. Firstly, we establish a DT model to obtain accurate digital representations of heterogeneous end devices and network state parameters in dynamic and complex IIoT scenarios. The DT model can capture time-varying requirements in a low latency manner. Secondly, we formulate two optimization problems to maximize the offloading throughput and total system utility. Finally, we convert the multi-objective optimization problems to a Stackelberg coalition game model and develop a distributed coalition formation approach to balance the two optimizing objectives. Simulation results indicate that, compared with the nearest coalition scheme and non-coalition scheme, the proposed approach achieves offloading throughput improvements of 11.5% and 148%, and enhances the overall utility by 12% and 170%, respectively.