TRAN: Task Replication with Guarantee via Multi-armed Bandit

Abstract

With the rapid development of edge computing, edge clusters need to deal with a tremendous amount of tasks, making some edge clusters overloaded, which further translates into task completion lag. Previous works usually copy the tasks from overloaded edges to idle edges so as to reduce the task queuing and computing delay. However, the completion delay of tasks copied to different edges cannot be predicted before the replication decision is made, which affects the overall task replication performance. In this paper, we propose an online task replication algorithm based on the predictions derived from multi-armed bandit. Via rigorous proof, the regret is ensured to be sub-linear upon the bandit, measuring the gap between the online decisions and the offline optimum. Extensive simulations are conducted to confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm over state-of-the-art replication strategies.