Delay and Throughput Analysis of Computation Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing: A Queueing Network Approach

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) enables mobile devices to offload computation to nearby edge servers and to the cloud in order to reduce end-to-end delay for applications such as AR/VR, real-time inference, and sensor-driven analytics. In this paper, we study static computation offloading when each task consists of multiple dependent subtasks represented by a rooted directed tree. We develop a product-form queueing-network (PFQN) model with an approximation to capture the computation and communication dynamics of tree-structured task execution in a multi-tier MEC system. Based on this model, we derive closed-form expressions for effective server utilizations and waiting times, and then construct a recursive algorithm for evaluating the average delay of general tree-structured tasks. We formulate the static offloading design problem as the minimization of the rate-weighted average task delay over the routing probabilities, and solve it through a differentiable optimization framework based on softmax parameterization, log-sum-exp smoothing, and a stability barrier on server utilizations. Numerical results show that the proposed PFQN approximation provides accurate delay estimates and that the delay-optimized static policy consistently outperforms the considered baseline algorithms in terms of both average task delay and empirical maximum stable throughput.