Application computation offloading for mobile edge computing

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-10440096-B2
Application number	US-201715855652-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Dec 27, 2017
Priority date	Dec 28, 2016
Publication date	Oct 8, 2019
Grant date	Oct 8, 2019

Abstract

Systems, apparatuses, methods, and computer-readable media, are provided for offloading computationally intensive tasks from one computer device to another computer device taking into account, inter alia, energy consumption and latency budgets for both computation and communication. Embodiments may also exploit multiple radio access technologies (RATs) in order to find opportunities to offload computational tasks by taking into account, for example, network/RAT functionalities, processing, offloading coding/encoding mechanisms, and/or differentiating traffic between different RATs. Other embodiments may be described and/or claimed.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A computer system to be employed as a mobile edge orchestrator (MEC-O) in a mobile edge computing (MEC) system, the computer system comprising:
network interface circuitry to communicate with a plurality of mobile edge hosts (MEHs) in the MEC system, wherein individual MEHs of the plurality of MEHs are located at or near a corresponding access node (AN) of a plurality of ANs; and
processor circuitry coupled with the network interface circuitry, the processor circuitry to:
identify network characteristics of the individual ANs;
identify MEH parameters of the individual MEHs, wherein the HEM parameters are to indicate available resources of each MEH;
identify application requirements of individual application tasks of one or more applications for computational offloading; and
select an MEH of the plurality of MEHs for the computational offloading based on the network characteristics, the MEH parameters, and the application requirements, wherein the computational offloading includes transfer of the individual application tasks to the selected MEH for execution.

2. The computer system of claim 1 , wherein:
the network characteristics comprise channel state information of each AN, backhaul state information of each AN, a type of radio access technology (RAT) of each AN, an average data rate of each AN, and an average round trip time (RTT);
the MEH parameters comprise a computational capacity of the respective MEHs, currently available computational load of the respective MEHs, a security level of the respective MEHs, and a reuse degree of computational MEH resources of the respective MEHs; and
the application requirements comprise a frequency at which the one or more applications tasks are to be offloaded, computational load for executing the individual application tasks, an amount of data to be transferred for the computational offloading, and an amount of data to be obtained from an MEH after execution of the individual application tasks.

3. The computer system of claim 1 , wherein at least one AN of the plurality of ANs is associated with a RAT that is different than other RATs of the other ANs of the plurality of ANs.

4. The computer system of claim 1 , wherein the processor circuitry is to:
determine, for the individual MEHs, a computation latency, communication latency, a computation energy consumption, and a communication energy consumption based on the network characteristics and the application requirements.

5. The computer system of claim 4 , wherein the processor circuitry is to:
determine, for the individual MEHs, a latency budget based on the computation latency and the communication latency; and
determine, for the individual MEHs, an energy consumption budget based on the computation energy consumption and the communication energy consumption.

6. The computer system of claim 5 , wherein, to select the MEH for the computational offloading, the processor circuitry is to:
select the MEH according to an offloading configuration, wherein the offloading configuration is to indicate that selection of the MEH is to be based on:
a lowest latency budget among the plurality of MEC hosts,
a lowest energy consumption budget among the plurality of MEC hosts,
a lowest latency budget among a set of the plurality of MEC hosts having an energy consumption budget that is less than an energy consumption threshold, or
a lowest energy consumption budget among a set of the plurality of MEC hosts having latency budget that is less than a latency threshold.

7. The computer system of claim 5 , wherein the network interface circuitry is to:
obtain, over a first reference point, an application offloading request message from a user equipment (UE), wherein the application offloading request message is to request an identity of an MEH on which to offload application tasks; and
send, over the first reference point, an application offloading report message to the UE, wherein the application offloading report is to indicate the selected individual MEH.

8. The computer system of claim 7 , wherein the network interface circuitry is to:
send, in response to receipt of the application offloading request message, MEH parameter request messages to each of the plurality of MEHs over respective second reference points;
obtain, over the respective second reference points, MEH parameter response messages from corresponding MEHs of the plurality of MEHs, wherein each second MEH parameter response message is to include MEH parameters of the corresponding MEHs.

9. The computer system of claim 8 , wherein the second reference point comprises an Mm3 interface; and the first reference point comprises an Mx2 interface, an Mm9 interface, or the Mm3 interface.

10. The computer system of claim 9 , further comprising: virtualization infrastructure including the processor circuitry, the network interface circuitry, and storage circuitry, and wherein the MEC-O is a virtual machine or a virtualized network function operated by the processor circuitry.

11. A user equipment (UE) comprising:
one or more UE applications to interact with a mobile edge computing (MEC) system comprising a plurality of mobile edge hosts (MEHs); and
an application offloader to:
identify network characteristics of individual access nodes (ANs) of a plurality of ANs, wherein the individual ANs are co-located with a corresponding MEH of the plurality of MEHs;
identify MEH parameters of individual MEHs of the plurality of MEHs, wherein the MEH parameters are to indicate available resources of the individuals MEHs;
identify application requirements of various application tasks of the one or more UE applications for computational offloading at one of the plurality of MEHs;
select an MEH of the plurality of MEHs for computational offloading of the various application tasks based on the network characteristics, the MEH parameters, and the application requirements; and
control transfer, during the computational offloading, of the various application tasks to the selected MEH for execution of the various application tasks.

12. The UE of claim 11 , wherein:
the network characteristics comprise channel state information of each AN, backhaul state information of each AN, a type of radio access technology (RAT) of each AN, an average data rate of each AN, and an average round trip time (RTT);
the MEH parameters comprise a computational capacity of the respective MEHs, currently available computational load of the respective MEHs, a security level of the respective MEHs, and a reuse degree of computational MEH resources of the respective MEHs; and
the application requirements comprise a frequency at which the one or more applications tasks are to be offloaded, computational load for executing the individual application tasks, an amount of data to be transferred for the computational offloading, and an amount of data to be obtained from an MEH after execution of the individual application tasks.

13. The UE of claim 11 , wherein at least one AN of the plurality of ANs is associated with a RAT that is different than other RATs of the other ANs of the plurality of ANs.

14. The UE of claim 13 , wherein the application offloader is to:
determine, for each MEH of the plurality of MEHs, a computation latency, communication latency, a computation energy consumption, and a communication energy consumption based on the network characteristics and the application requirements.

15. The UE of claim 14 , wherein the application offloader is to:
determine, for each MEH of the plurality of MEHs, a latency budget based on the computation latency an

Assignees

• Intel Corp
• Intel Ip Corp

Inventors

• Sabella Dario
• Filippou Miltiadis
• Roth Kilian
• Karls Ingolf
• Yang Yang
• Zhu Jing

Classifications

• H04W28/0205

  at the air interface (dynamic wireless traffic scheduling H04W72/12) · CPC title

• H04L47/803

  Application aware · CPC title

• G06F2209/509

  Offload · CPC title

• H04L67/10

  in which an application is distributed across nodes in the network (software deployment G06F8/60; multiprogramming arrangements G06F9/46) · CPC title

• H04W52/0264

  by selectively disabling software applications · CPC title