Offloading framework for computation service in the edge cloud and core cloud: A case study for face recognition

A fast rate of progress has allowed the proliferation of smartphones and eased their extensive presence in people's daily life. However, low processing speed and limited battery capacity have hindered improvements in the smartphone's computational capabilities. Offloading computational tasks to the cloud could solve this problem by enabling users to access these services over the Internet. Edge cloud computing has been recognized as an emerging field within the cloud computing paradigm, where computation servers are situated at the edge of the Internet to reduce network delay and traffic. Nevertheless, offloading tasks to the cloud is not always beneficial due to variable network conditions and increased processing costs. In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning‐based offloading framework has been presented that provides smartphones with the ability to make decisions for local processing in the smartphone or to offload processing tasks to the cloud (edge and/or core). Thus, a smartphone can minimize the combination of the processing time, energy consumption, and monetary cost and maximize the accuracy of face recognition as well. Simulation results under synthetic scenarios show that the proposed offloading framework can effectively adapt to the dynamic cloud computing and networking environment.