Publication

Abstract : Task offloading opens a gateway for robotic applications to leverage computation support from the cloud infrastructure. It exploits a trade-off between the robot's and cloud's processing capabilities, and the communication between the two entities plays a critical role in making these decisions. Two major factors that significantly influence communication are network connectivity (bandwidth) and mobility of the robot. We integrate these two factors with the offloading decisions to formulate an optimization problem. Our objective in this paper is to improve the quality of service (QoS) for a 25 node application taskflow, known as direct acyclic graph. We propose a genetic algorithm based approach to solve the optimization problem which performs a novel three-layer decision making: (i) whether to offload a task or not, (ii) path planning to reach a desired location for offloading/local execution, (iii) select access point to associate with for offloading. We simulate for a smart city scenario consisting of 36-cell workspace with obstacles and compare the offloading results with a well- established fixed movement offloading method. The outcomes of our study suggest that motion and connectivity aware offloading leads to more efficient performance in terms of improved QoS and minimum consumption of resources, i.e., energy, time or distance.