Energy Aware Offloading for Competing Users on a Shared Communication Channel

This paper considers a set of mobile users that employ cloud-based computation offloading. In order to execute jobs in the cloud, the user uploads must occur over a base station channel that is shared by all of the uploading users. Since the job completion times are subject to hard deadline constraints, this restricts the feasible set of jobs that can be processed. The system is modelled as a competitive game in which each user is interested in minimizing its own energy consumption. The game is subject to the real-time constraints imposed by the job execution deadlines, user specific channel bit rates, and the competition over the shared communication channel. The paper shows that for a wide range of parameters, a game where each user independently sets its offloading decisions always has a pure Nash equilibrium, and a Gauss-Seidel-like method for determining this equilibrium is introduced. Results are presented that illustrate that the system always converges to a Nash equilibrium using the Gauss-Seidel method. Data is also presented that show the number of iterations required, and the quality of the solutions. We find that the solutions perform well compared to a lower bound on total energy performance.