Joint Job Partitioning and Collaborative Computation Offloading for Internet of Things

Advances in Internet of Things (IoT) bring massive intelligent applications, many of which are computation intensive and time sensitive. With limited resources of IoT devices, mobile computation offloading can be exploited to offload part of the applications to nearby devices that have more powerful computing resources, thereby speeding up the applications and reducing the energy consumption. In this paper, we consider application partitioning and collaborative computation offloading in IoT networks, in order to meet the completion deadline of the applications while minimizing the overall energy consumption. The problem is formulated as a binary integer linear programming problem, which is transformed into a weighted bipartite matching problem and then solved by the centralized Kuhn–Munkres algorithm. To fit the large-scale IoT scenarios, three distributed algorithms are then introduced from different perspectives. The first one is referred to as the noncooperative matching (NCM) algorithm, where each node makes offloading decision based on its own interest in minimizing energy consumption. Afterward, an asynchronous greedy matching (AGM) algorithm is developed by considering the mutual interest of the requestor and collaborator pairs in terms of their energy consumptions. Finally, a maximum differential energy matching (MDEM) algorithm is devised by relaxing the network stability requirement, which can further benefit the energy efficiency for all network nodes. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that both the NCM and AGM algorithms guarantee the network stability and improve the energy saving compared with entirely local execution, while the MDEM algorithm can further achieve near-optimal energy consumption at the expense of higher implementation overheads.