OnDisc: Online Latency-Sensitive Job Dispatching and Scheduling in Heterogeneous Edge-Clouds

In edge-cloud computing, a set of servers (called edge servers) are deployed near the mobile devices to allow these devices to offload their jobs to and subsequently obtain their results from the edge servers with low latency. One fundamental problem in edge-cloud systems is how to dispatch and schedule the jobs so that the job response time (defined as the interval between the release of the job and the arrival of the computation result at the device) is minimized. In this paper, we propose a general model for this problem, where the jobs are generated in arbitrary order and at arbitrary times at the mobile devices and then offloaded to servers with both upload and download delays. Our goal is to minimize the total weighted response time of all the jobs. The weight is set based on how latency-sensitive the job is. We derive the first online job dispatching and scheduling algorithm in edge-clouds, called OnDisc, which is scalable in the speed augmentation model; that is, OnDisc is $(1 + \varepsilon )$ -speed $O(1/\varepsilon )$ -competitive for any small constant $\varepsilon > 0$ . Moreover, OnDisc can be easily implemented in distributed systems. We also extend OnDisc with a fairness knob to incorporate the trade-off between the average job response time and the degree of fairness among jobs. Extensive simulations based on a real-world data-trace from Google show that OnDisc can reduce the total weighted response time dramatically compared with heuristic algorithms.