Task offloading in mobile edge computing using cost-based discounted optimal stopping

Mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm has emerged to improve the quality of service & experience of applications deployed in close proximity to end-users. Due to their restricted computational and communication resources, MEC nodes can provide access to a portion of the entire set of services and data gathered. Therefore, there are several obstacles to their management. Keeping track of all the services offered by the MEC nodes is challenging, particularly if their demand rates change over time. Received tasks (such as, analytics queries, classification tasks, and model learning) require services to be invoked in real MEC use-case scenarios, e.g., smart cities. It is not unusual for a node to lack the necessary services or part of them. Undeniably, not all the requested services may be locally available; thus, MEC nodes must deal with the timely and appropriate choice of whether to carry out a service replication (pull action) or tasks offloading (push action) to peer nodes in a MEC environment. In this study, we contribute with a novel time-optimized mechanism based on the optimal stopping theory, which is built on the cost-based decreasing service demand rates evidenced in various service management situations. Our mechanism tries to optimally solve the decision-making dilemma between pull and push action. The experimental findings of our mechanism and its comparative assessment with other methods found in the literature showcase the achieved optimal decisions with respect to certain cost-based objective functions over dynamic service demand rates.