Heterogeneous edge offloading with incomplete information: a minority game approach

Task offloading is one of key operations in edge computing, which is essential for reducing the latency of task processing and boosting the capacity of end devices. However, the heterogeneity among tasks generated by various users makes it challenging to design efficient task offloading algorithms. In addition, the assumption of complete information for offloading decision-making does not always hold in a distributed edge computing environment. In this article, we formulate the problem of heterogeneous task offloading in a distributed environment as a minority game (MG), in which each player must make decisions independently in each turn and the players who end up on the minority side win. The multi-player MG incentivizes players to cooperate with each other in the scenarios with incomplete information, where players don't have full information about other players (e.g., the number of tasks, the required resources). To address the challenges incurred by task heterogeneity and the divergence of naive MG approaches, we propose an MG based scheme, in which tasks are divided into subtasks and instructed to form into a set of groups as possible, and the left ones are scheduled to perform decision adjustment in a probabilistic manner. We prove that our proposed algorithm can converge to a near-optimal point, and also investigate its stability and price of anarchy in terms of task processing time. Finally, we conduct a series of simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme and the results indicate that our scheme can achieve around 30% reduction of task processing time compared with other approaches. Moreover, our proposed scheme can converge to a near-optimal point, which cannot be guaranteed by naive MG approaches.