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To achieve high efficiency with limitation of energy consumption is a key problem in the system of UAVs. In existing UAV task allocation methods, the relevance between tasks and UAV cruise directions is neglected, which may further influence the energy consumption and delay of task accomplishment. In view of this, this paper proposed an UAV task allocation method based on the relevance analysis between tasks and cruise directions. This method includes two phases: task screening phase and conflict resolution phase based on consensus. In the first phase, this method selects out tasks without turning back for an UAV according to angles between the cruise direction of the UAV and directions of these tasks, then designs an algorithm to further select candidate tasks before interaction from the tasks without turning back according to their energy consumption utility parameters and time urgency parameters. In the second phase, this method solves tasks conflicts between UAVs after exchanging of their candidate tasks according to energy consumption utility parameters and time delay parameters of these tasks in different cruise directions of these UAVs. Simulation results verify that the proposed method can achieve lower average task energy consumption and average task delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roadside units (RSUs), which have strong computing capability and are close to vehicle nodes, have been widely used to process delay- and computation-intensive tasks of vehicle nodes. However, due to their high mobility, vehicles may drive out of the coverage of RSUs before receiving the task processing results. In this paper, we propose a mobile edge computing-assisted vehicular network, where vehicles can offload their tasks to a nearby vehicle via a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) link or a nearby RSU via a vehicle-to-infrastructure link. These tasks are also migrated by a V2V link or an infrastructure-to-infrastructure (I2I) link to avoid the scenario where the vehicles cannot receive the processed task from the RSUs. Considering mutual interference from the same link of offloading tasks and migrating tasks, we construct a vehicle offloading decision-based game to minimize the computation overhead. We prove that the game can always achieve Nash equilibrium and convergence by exploiting the finite improvement property. We then propose a task migration (TM) algorithm that includes three task-processing methods and two task-migration methods. Based on the TM algorithm, computation overhead minimization offloading (COMO) algorithm is presented. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed TM and COMO algorithms reduce the computation overhead and increase the success rate of task processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web virtual reality (WebVR) is gaining increasing attention as interactive VR experiences become more prevalent. The high energy consumption and strict quality requirements are still significant challenges for its application in the mobile edge network. In this context, content caching and task offloading are promising solutions to save the energy of WebVR. This paper proposes a hybrid decentralized offloading architecture in which the MEC server and multiple terminals jointly participate in the caching and processing of WebVR tasks. In this framework, the graph convolutional network and unsupervised clustering algorithm are jointly applied to process the WebVR service feature graph to achieve FoV-level content caching. Moreover, WebVR users with idle computing resources assist neighboring users with performing tasks. On this basis, we propose a distributed low-bound-based alternative direction method of multiplier (LADMM) algorithm to optimize the offloading mode and the allocation of tasks and computing power resources to minimize system energy consumption. The proposed offloading mode can lower energy consumption while maintaining a good balance between delay performance and resource utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive delay-sensitive and computation-intensive tasks are involved in emerging vehicular applications. These tasks can hardly be all processed by the resource constrained vehicle alone, nor fully offloaded to edge facilities (like road side units) due to their incomplete coverage. To this end, we refer to the new paradigm of vehicular collaborative edge computing (VCEC) and make the best use of vehicles’ idle and redundant resources for energy consumption reduction within the VCEC system. To realize this target, we are faced with several nontrivial challenges, including short-term decision making coupled with long-term queue delay constraints, information uncertainty, and task offloading conflicts. Accordingly, we apply Lyapunov optimization to decouple the original problem into three sub-problems and then tackle them one by one: the first sub-problem is resolved by Lagrange multiplier method; the second is handled by UCB learning-matching approach; the third is addressed by a carefully designed greedy method. Scenarios without volatility and real-world road topology with realistic vehicular traffics are utilized to evaluate the proposed solution. Results from extensive numerical simulations demonstrate that our solution can achieve superior performances compared with the benchmark methods, in terms of energy consumption, learning regret, task backlog, and end-to-end delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taskflow tackles the long-standing question: How can we make it easier for developers to program parallel and heterogeneous computer-aided design (CAD) applications with high performance and simultaneous high productivity? Taskflow introduces a new powerful task graph programming model to assist developers in the implementation of parallel and heterogeneous algorithms with complex control flow. We develop an efficient system runtime to solve many of the new scheduling challenges arising out of our models and optimize the performance across latency, energy efficiency, and throughput. Taskflow has demonstrated promising performance on both micro-benchmarks and real-world applications. As an example, Taskflow solved a large-scale circuit placement problem up to 17% faster, with $1.3\times $ fewer memory, $2.1\times $ less power consumption, and $2.9\times $ higher throughput than two industrial-strength systems, oneTBB and StarPU, on a machine of 40 CPUs and 4 GPUs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fleets of cooperative drones are a powerful tool in monitoring critical scenarios requiring early anomaly discovery and intervention. Due to limited energy availability and application requirements, drones may visit target points in consecutive trips, with recharging and data offloading in between. To capture timeliness of intervention and prioritize early coverage, we propose the new notion of Weighted Progressive Coverage, which is based on the definition of time dependent weights. Weighted progressive coverage generalizes classic notions of coverage, as well as a new notion of accumulative coverage specifically designed to address trip scheduling. We show that weighted progressive coverage maximization is NP-hard and propose an efficient polynomial algorithm, called Greedy and Prune (GaP), with guaranteed approximation. By means of simulations we show that GaP performs close to the optimal solution and outperforms a previous approach in all the considered performance metrics, including coverage, average inspection delay, energy consumption, and computation time, in a wide range of application scenarios. Through prototype experiments we also confirm the theoretical and simulation analysis, and demonstrate the applicability of our algorithm in real scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged as an effective paradigm to enhance the computing capability of capability-limited mobile devices (MDs). In this article, we consider an MEC system consisting of a number of MEC servers and one MD which generates a series of tasks characterized by their dependency relationships. We study computation scheduling and offloading problem of the tasks. To improve the task processing performance, we first propose a parallel transmission and execution (PTE) scheme, based on which we design a computation scheduling and offloading algorithm. Considering the fairness among tasks in terms of task transmission and execution time, we formulate the computation scheduling and offloading problem as a constrained worst-case latency optimization problem which minimizes the maximum completion time of all the tasks. As the original optimization problem cannot be solved conveniently, we first categorize the tasks into high priority tasks (HPTs), medium priority tasks (MPTs) and low priority tasks (LPTs) based on their task execution status and causal relationship. Then, a dynamic priority-based computation scheduling and offloading algorithm is proposed, which designs computation scheduling and offloading strategy for dynamically-changed HPTs and MPTs, respectively. In particular, for HPTs, a multiple knapsack-based heuristic algorithm is proposed, and a task weight and data size-based computation scheduling and offloading algorithm is further proposed for MPTs. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the explosive growth in the scale of cloud computing infrastructures, reliability and energy efficiency have become important concerns considering the great complexity of cloud data centers. There is an urgent need for efficient task assignment that can dispatch tasks to appropriate cloud data center servers, which is critical to achieve reliability and energy efficiency in current cloud data centers. Most of the research on task assignment focuses on only one of the objectives of reliability and energy efficiency, while the two objectives are intrinsically conflicting with each other. In this paper, we deal with the problem of task assignment in data centers, with the objective of minimizing the energy consumption while providing failure tolerance to task execution failure. We propose a reliability-aware and energy-efficient task replica assignment algorithm based on running task replicas at a low speed and enabling multiple task replicas to share the same server resources. Each task in a job processed by the cloud computing platform has two instances: main task and task replica (shadow). Each main task runs on an individual server, and the task replica associated with the main task is assigned on a different server. The main tasks run at the full server speed, while the task replicas run at a lower rate than the main tasks. The task replicas can be mapped onto dedicated backup servers or be assigned to the servers on which the main tasks are running. Multiple task replicas can share the same server resources to reduce the number of servers required. We conduct experiments through simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the energy consumption, while achieving a good balance between the number of servers used and job completion time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising solution to support emerging delay-sensitive mobile applications, such as self-driving, augment/virtual reality, and various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. By deploying MEC servers at network edge, e.g., close to cellular base stations (BSs), the computational tasks generated by these applications can be offloaded to edge nodes (ENs) and be quickly executed there. At the same time, with the projected large number of IoT devices, the communication and computational resources allocated to each user can be quite limited, making it challenging to provide low-latency MEC services. In this paper, we investigate the problem of task partitioning and user association in an MEC system, aiming to minimize the average latency of all users. We assume that each task can be partitioned into multiple subtasks that can be executed on local devices (e.g., vehicles), MEC servers, and/or cloud servers; each user can be associated with one of the nearby ENs. The subtasks can be independent of or dependent on each other. For each case, we formulate the joint optimization of task partitioning ratios and user association as a mixed integer programming problem. Each problem is solved by decomposing it into two subproblems. The lower-level subproblem is task partitioning under a given user association, which can be solved optimally. The higher-level subproblem is user association, we propose a dual decomposition-based approach and a matching-based approach to derive near-optimal solutions. Simulation results show that compared to benchmark schemes, the proposed schemes reduce the average latency by about 50% and 40% for the cases of independent and dependent subtasks, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, sub-channel scheduling, task assignment and power allocation are investigated for orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-based and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based mobile edge computing (MEC) systems. Based on different channel conditions and computational capacities, computational tasks are partially offloaded to the MEC server via OMA or NOMA protocols. In order to minimize the total energy consumption, an optimization problem under the task execution latency constraint is formulated and divided into two sub-problems. By utilizing matching theory, the formulated sub-channel allocation problem is solved by a proposed low-complexity algorithm, where the joint optimization of task assignment and power allocation is performed at each iteration. Based on the delay constraint, some insights are obtained, and the closed-form solutions of task assignment coefficients and transmit power are derived. Furthermore, the offloading strategy in both OMA and NOMA schemes is analyzed, which shows that the optimal task assignment coefficient is decided by the energy consumption efficiency (ECE). Simulation results indicate that: i) the proposed sub-channel allocation algorithm and derived closed-form solutions can significantly improve the MEC system in terms of the energy consumption; ii) the provided offloading strategy can be dynamically and efficiently employed with different channel conditions and computational capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Internet of Health Things (IoHT)-based e-Health paradigm, a large number of computational-intensive tasks have to be offloaded from resource-limited IoHT devices to proximal powerful edge servers to reduce latency and improve energy efficiency. However, the lack of global state information (GSI), the adversarial competition among multiple IoHT devices, and the ultra reliable and low latency communication (URLLC) constraints have imposed new challenges for task offloading optimization. In this article, we formulate the task offloading problem as an adversarial multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. In addition to the average-based performance metrics, bound violation probability, occurrence probability of extreme events, and statistical properties of excess values are employed to characterize URLLC constraints. Then, we propose a URLLC-aware Task Offloading scheme based on the exponential-weight algorithm for exploration and exploitation (EXP3) named UTO-EXP3. URLLC awareness is achieved by dynamically balancing the URLLC constraint deficits and energy consumption through online learning. We provide a rigorous theoretical analysis to show that guaranteed performance with a bounded deviation can be achieved by UTO-EXP3 based on only local information. Finally, the effectiveness and reliability of UTO-EXP3 are validated through simulation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mixed-criticality system provides multiple real-time applications with different criticalities in a single system. Poor energy-saving performance of the previous studies on mixed-criticality sporadic tasks are mainly due to the fact that the slack time generated from the random arrival of sporadic tasks is not taken into account. In this article, we focus on scheduling energy aware mixed-criticality sporadic tasks and take the random arrival of sporadic tasks into account. We proposed a dynamically frequency updating mixed-criticality algorithm (DFU). DFU based on the earliest deadline first scheme can exploit the slack time generated from high criticality tasks in a low criticality mode to reduce processor frequency. In addition, it also can dynamically update the utilization of sporadic tasks set to further reduce processor frequency. The simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of DFU and experimental results show that DFU consumes 34.29% less energy than that of the existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with real-time scheduling of homogeneous multicore platforms powered by a battery to be periodically recharged. A system is composed of reconfigurable real-time dependent and periodic tasks to be assigned to different cores interconnected by a network-on-chip (NoC). The system is subject to reconfigurations, which are automatic operations allowing the addition and/or removal of tasks as well as their exchanged messages on the NoC. Consequently, any reconfiguration can violate real-time and energy constraints on cores as well as the NoC when the energy is unavailable until the next recharge. A novel periodic task model based on elastic coefficients and a new scheduling strategy are proposed to compute useful temporal parameters allowing for tasks and messages to meet the related constraints while controlling the communication cost on the NoC. This strategy is compared with an integer linear programming-based optimal solution, and a tool named OptimalMappingTasks is developed to run different simulations that prove the originality of this paper’s contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of statically scheduling a task graph of moldable streaming tasks (i.e., the actor network) to a multicore or many-core CPU with discrete dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). We employ an integer linear programming (ILP) approach that combines allocating cores to tasks, mapping tasks to core subsets, selecting a DVFS level for each task, and considering all options for task fusion as provided by a cost model, given data throughput and latency requirements and targeting low energy consumption. We also propose a partly decoupled approach that applies greedy prefusion before running an ILP-based scheduler considering the other three subproblems together. We use microbenchmarking on an ARM big.LITTLE architecture to quantify the advantage of task fusion in the above setting, and evaluate the use of task fusion in terms of energy savings, latency improvement, and scheduling time for three real-world applications. We confirm the scheduling results by running the applications with and without task fusions on the ARM big.LITTLE. Results indicate that streaming applications can profit from task fusion, as we achieve a significant reduction of energy consumption in most cases, while scheduling time is only moderately increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider parallel and sequential task offloading to multiple mobile edge computing servers. The task consists of a set of inter-dependent sub-tasks, which are scheduled to servers to minimize both offloading latency and failure probability. Two algorithms are proposed to solve the scheduling problem, which are based on genetic algorithm and conflict graph models, respectively. Simulation results show that these algorithms provide performance close to the optimal solution, which is obtained through exhaustive search. Furthermore, although parallel offloading uses orthogonal channels, results demonstrate that the sequential offloading yields a reduced offloading failure probability when compared to the parallel offloading. On the other hand, parallel offloading provides less latency. However, as the dependency among sub-tasks increases, the latency gap between parallel and sequential schemes decreases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by various delay sensitive applications, we address the problem of coordinating the offloading decisions of wireless devices that periodically generate computationally intensive tasks. We consider autonomous devices that aim at minimizing their own cost by choosing when to perform their tasks and whether or not to offload their tasks to an edge cloud through one of the multiple wireless links. We develop a game theoretical model of the problem, prove the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria and propose a polynomial complexity algorithm for computing an equilibrium. Furthermore, we characterize the structure of the equilibria, and by providing an upper bound on the price of anarchy of the game we establish an asymptotically tight bound on the approximation ratio of the proposed algorithm. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves significant performance gain compared to uncoordinated computation offloading at a computational complexity that is on average linear in the number of devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the booming development of IoT and massive smart MDs springing up in daily life, the conflict between resource-hungry IoT applications and resource-constrained MDs becomes increasingly prominent. To cope with compute-intensive applications and big data, MCC combining AI was adopted as a workable solution. Nevertheless, considering MCC's long transmission latency and the ultra-low latency requirements of most IoT applications, traditional MCC combining AI is not applicable any more in the era of IoT. Migrating cloud computing capabilities to the edge, and integrating AI with it, are envisioned to be a promising paradigm, which gives rise to the so-called edge intelligence. As a pivotal technique in edge computing, task offloading can effectively improve the MDs' computation and energy efficiency. However, existing research on task offloading mostly focused on fixed scenarios and cannot deal with varying situations, where user privacy protection was neglected either. Toward this end, we introduce machine learning into task offloading at the edge, and design an intelligent task offloading scheme. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme cannot only have good adaptability and security, but also achieve high prediction accuracy and low processing delay, compared to traditional offloading schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two factors primarily affect the performance of multi-threaded tasks on many-core processors with logically-shared and physically-distributed Last-Level Cache (LLC): the LLC latencies of threads running on different cores and the per-core power budgets that aim to guarantee thermally safe operation. Two knobs affect these factors: First, the mapping of threads to cores affects both the LLC latencies and the power budgets. Second, dynamic power budgeting refines the power budgets during task execution. A mapping that spatially distributes threads across the many-core increases the power budgets, but unfortunately also increases the LLC latencies. Contrarily, mapping all threads near the center of the many-core minimizes the LLC latencies, but unfortunately also decreases the power budgets. Consequently, both metrics cannot be simultaneously optimal, which leads to a Pareto-optimization for task mapping that has formerly not been exploited. Dynamic power budgeting reallocates the power budgets according to the tasks’ execution phases. This results in a dynamically changing non-uniform power budget, which further increases the performance. We are the first to present a run-time algorithm PCGov combining task-agnostic task mapping and task-aware dynamic power budgeting for many-cores with shared distributed LLC. PCGov yields up to 21 percent lower response time and 13 percent lower energy consumption compared to the state-of-the-art, with a low overhead of less than 0.5 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Task offloading is a promising technology to exploit the available computational resources in spatially distributed fog nodes efficiently in the era of fog computing. In this paper, we look for an online task offloading strategy to minimize the long-term cost, which factors in the latency, the energy consumption, and the switching cost. To this end, we formulate a stochastic programming problem and the expectations of the system parameters are allowed to change abruptly at unknown time instants. Meanwhile, we consider the fact that the queried nodes can only feed back the processing results after finishing the tasks. Then we put forth an effective bandit learning algorithm, i.e., the BLOT, to solve this challenging stochastic programming under the non-stationary bandit model. We also demonstrate that our proposed BLOT algorithm is asymptotically optimal in a non-stationary fog-enabled network. Numerical experiments further verify the superb performance of BLOT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterogenerous multi-cores utilize the strength of different architectures for executing particular types of workload, and usually offer higher performance and energy efficiency. In this paper, we study the worst-case response time (WCRT) analysis of typed scheduling of parallel DAG tasks on heterogeneous multi-cores, where the workload of each vertex in the DAG is only allowed to execute on a particular type of cores. The only known WCRT bound for this problem is grossly pessimistic and suffers the non-self-sustainability problem. In this paper, we propose two new WCRT bounds. The first new bound has the same time complexity as the existing bound, but is more precise and solves its non-self-sustainability problem. The second new bound explores more detailed task graph structure information to greatly improve the precision, but is computationally more expensive. We prove that the problem of computing the second bound is strongly NP-hard if the number of types in the system is a variable, and develop an efficient algorithm which has polynomial time complexity if the number of types is a constant. Experiments with randomly generated workload show that our proposed new methods are more precise than the existing bound while having good scalability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the problem of task offloading in a software-defined access network, where IoT devices are connected to fog computing nodes by multi-hop IoT access-points (APs). The proposed scheme considers the following aspects in a fog-computing-based IoT architecture: 1) optimal decision on local or remote task computation; 2) optimal fog node selection; and 3) optimal path selection for offloading. Accordingly, we formulate the multi-hop task offloading problem as an integer linear program (ILP). Since the feasible set is non-convex, we propose a greedy-heuristic-based approach to efficiently solve the problem. The greedy solution takes into account delay, energy consumption, multi-hop paths, and dynamic network conditions, such as link utilization and SDN rule-capacity. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is capable of reducing the average delay and energy consumption by 12% and 21%, respectively, compared with the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network-on-Chips (NoC) are widely used in industrial applications since they provide communication parallelism and reduce energy consumption. The use of NoC has been recently extended to real-time systems, whose execution has to meet temporal constraints. Communication delays introduced by the network make the scheduling analysis challenging. In this article, we propose a new NoC communication model called ECTM. The main goal of this model is to assess the schedulability of dependent periodic tasks exchanging messages on a NoC. ECTM is a model allowing schedulability analysis of messages and tasks of the NoC. To achieve schedulability, ECTM produces an analysis model by transforming NoC messages to tasks in order to take into account communication delays during the scheduling analysis. Schedulability of the system is assessed using simulation over the feasibility interval with a list scheduling, ECTM supports Store-And-Forward and Wormhole NoC. In this article, we have demonstrated the correctness of the transformations of ECTM. ECTM has been implemented in a real-time scheduling analysis tool called Cheddar and we performed experiments to assess its efficiency. ECTM is more efficient than existing solutions with an improvement of 30% for Store-And-Forward NoCs and up to 100% for Wormhole NoCs, while the proposed model requires a larger computation time about 17% for Store-And-Forward NoCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]