Application computation offloading for mobile edge computing

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-11050813-B2
Application number	US-201916554824-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Aug 29, 2019
Priority date	Dec 28, 2016
Publication date	Jun 29, 2021
Grant date	Jun 29, 2021

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. An edge computing device operable in an edge computing system, comprising:
processor circuitry configured to:
identify network characteristics of connectivity with a network for respective nodes in the edge computing system, the edge computing system configured to enable orchestrated execution of distributed computing operations among the respective nodes;
identify resource parameters of the respective nodes, the resource parameters configured to indicate computation and communication resources available at the respective nodes;
identify application requirements of at least one application task of at least one application, the application requirements configured to indicate requirements to perform computational offloading of the at least one application to the respective nodes; and
select a node of the respective nodes for computational offloading based on the network characteristics, the resource parameters, and the application requirements, wherein the computational offloading causes transfer of the application task to the selected node for execution.

2. The edge computing device of claim 1 , wherein:
the network characteristics indicate at least one of: channel state information of the network at the respective nodes, backhaul state information for the respective nodes, a type of radio access technology (RAT) used at the respective nodes, an average data rate at the respective nodes, or an average round trip time (RTT) at the respective nodes;
the resource parameters indicate at least one of: a computational capacity at the respective nodes, currently available computational load at the respective nodes, a security level at the respective nodes, or a re-use degree f computational resources at the respective nodes; and
the application requirements indicate at least one of: a frequency at which the at least one application task is to be offloaded, a computational load for executing the at least one application task, an amount of data to be transferred for the computational offloading, or an amount of data to be obtained from a node after execution of the at least one application task.

3. The edge computing device of claim 1 , wherein at least one node of the respective nodes is associated with a radio access technology (RAT) that is different than other RATs of the other nodes of the respective nodes.

4. The edge computing device of claim 1 , wherein the processor circuitry is to:
determine, for the respective nodes, 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 edge computing device of claim 4 , wherein the processor circuitry is farther configured to:
determine, for the respective nodes, a latency budget based or the computation latency, and the communication latency; and
determine, for the respective nodes, an energy consumption budget based on the computation energy consumption and the communication energy consumption.

6. The edge computing device of claim 5 , wherein the operations to select the node for the computational offloading, includes operations to:
select the node according to an offloading configuration, wherein the offloading configuration indicates that a selection of the node is to be based on:
a lowest latency budget among the respective nodes,
a lowest energy consumption budget among the respective nodes,
a lowest latency budget among a set of the respective nodes having an energy consumption budget that is less than an energy consumption threshold, or
a lowest energy consumption budget among a set of the respective nodes having s latency budget that is less than a latency threshold.

7. The edge computing device of claim 1 , wherein the respective nodes comprise a plurality of mobile edge hosts (MEHs) in the edge computing system, the edge computing device further comprising:
network interface circuitry to communicate with the respective nodes, wherein individual MEHs of the plurality of MEI-Is are located at or near a corresponding access node of a plurality of access nodes, and wherein the edge computing system is adapted to operate according to an European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) specification.

8. The edge computing device of claim 7 , wherein the processor circuitry is further configured 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 individual node 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 node.

9. The edge computing device of claim 8 , wherein the network interface circuitry is to:
send, in response to receipt of the application offloading request message, parameter request messages to each of the plurality of MEI-Is over respective second reference points; and
obtain, over the respective second reference points, parameter response messages from corresponding MEI-Is of the plurality of MEHs, wherein each second parameter response message is to include parameters of the corresponding MEHs.

10. The edge computing device of claim 9 , wherein the second reference points are provided via Mm3 interfaces, and the first reference point is provided via an Mx2 interface, an Mtn9 interface, or an Mm3 interface, as defined according to the ETSI MEC specification.

11. The edge computing device of claim 1 , wherein the respective nodes are located among a plurality of access networks, wherein network operations are performed among the plurality of access networks utilizing a Multipath Transport Control Protocol (MPTCP) aware Generic Multi-Access (GMA) control procedure using MPTCP-aware GMA control signaling, wherein the MPTCP-aware GMA control signaling includes information to perform a capability exchange of a MPTCP proxy IP address and port number, per access network.

12. At least one non-transitory machine-readable storage device comprising instructions, which when executed by processing circuitry of a computing device in an edge computing system, causes the processing circuitry to perform operations to:
identify network characteristics of connectivity with a network for respective nodes in the edge computing system, the edge computing system configured to enable orchestrated execution of distributed computing operations among the respective nodes;
identify resource parameters of the respective nodes, the resource parameters configured to indicate computation and communication resources available at the respective nodes;
identify application requirements of at least one application task of at least one application, the application requirements configured to indicate requirements to perform computational offloading of the at least one application to the respective nodes; and
select a node of the respective nodes for computational offloading based on the network characteristics, the resource parameters, and the application requirements, wherein the computational offloading causes transfer of the application task to the selected node for execution.

13. The machine-readable storage device of claim 12 , wherein:
the network characteristics indicate at least one of: channel state information of the network at the respective nodes, backhaul state information for the respective nodes, a type of radio access technology (RAT) used at the respective nodes, an average data rate at the res

Assignees

• Intel Ip Corp

Inventors

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

Classifications

• G06F9/5072

  Grid computing · CPC title

• H04W28/0205

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

• H04L47/803

  Application aware · CPC title

• H04W52/0264

  by selectively disabling software applications · CPC title

• Y02D30/70

  in wireless communication networks · CPC title