Profit-Maximized Task Offloading with Simulated-annealing-based Migrating Birds Optimization in Hybrid Cloud-Edge Systems

As an emerging framework, edge computing achieves Internet of Things by providing computing, storage and network resources. It moves computation to edge devices located near users. Nevertheless, nodes in the edge often own limited resources and constrained energy capacities. It is impossible to entirely execute tasks in the edge due to their unsatisfied quality of service. Cloud data centers (CDCs) own almost unlimited resources yet they might cause large transmission delay and high resource cost. Consequently, it is highly needed to intelligently offload tasks between CDC and edge. This work proposes a task offloading algorithm for hybrid cloud-edge systems to achieve profit maximization of a system provider with response time bound assurance. It comprehensively investigates CPU, memory and bandwidth limits of nodes in the edge, and constraints of available energy and servers in CDC. These factors are integrated into a single-objective constrained optimization problem, which is solved by a simulated-annealing-based migrating birds optimization algorithm to yield a close-to-optimal offloading policy between CDC and the edge. Real-life data-driven experimental results show that its profit outperforms its four typical peers.