This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2019.2944007, IEEE Internet of
Things Journal
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL
Joint Optimization of Offloading Utility and Privacy
for Edge Computing Enabled IoT
Xiaolong Xu, Member, IEEE, Chengxun He, Zhanyang Xu, Lianyong Qi*, Member, IEEE,
Shaohua Wan, Senior Member, IEEE and Md Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Currently, edge computing, emerging as a burgeon-
ing paradigm, is powerful to handle real-time resource provision
for the IoT applications. However, due to the spatial distribution
of the geographically sparse IoT devices and the resource limita-
tions of the edge computing units (ECUs), the resource utilization
of corresponding edge servers is relatively insufficient, and the
execution performance is ineffective to some extent. Meanwhile,
privacy leakage including personal information, location and
media data, etc., during the transmission process from IoTs
devices to edge servers severely restricts the application of ECUs
in IoT. To address these challenges, a two-phase offloading
optimization strategy is put forward for joint optimization of
offloading utility and privacy in edge computing enabled IoT.
Technically, a utility-aware task offloading method, named UTO,
is devised first to obtain the goal of maximizing the resource
utilization of ECUs and minimizing the implementation time cost.
Then a joint optimization method, named JOM, for utility and
privacy trade-offs is designed to balance the privacy preservation
and execution performance. Eventually, experimental evaluations
are designed to illustrate the efficiency and reliability of UTO and
JOM.
Index Terms—Privacy, Utility, IoT, Edge Computing, Offload-
ing
I. I NTRODUCTION
Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to efficiently improve
the performance of software services through supporting mul-
tiple intelligence fields like modern medical, digital home
and smart transportation [1]. Generally, embedded IoT devices
are insufficient to hold the computation-intensive tasks, e.g.,
tanglesome data mining and high definition video decoding.
To satisfy the computation and storage requests of the tasks
generated by IoT devices, cloud computing has become the
most fashionable computation philosophy for dealing with
these assignments [2]. A convenient implementation manner
for the process of these tasks is transmitting all generated data
X. Xu, C. He and Z. Xu are with the School of Computer and Software,
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China.
X. Xu is with Jiangsu Engineering Center of Network Monitoring, Nanjing
University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China.
Email: njuxlxu@gmail.com,cxunhey@gmail.com,zhanyang xu@nuist.edu.cn
L. Qi is with the School of Information Science and Engineering, Qufu
Normal University, China.
E-mail: lianyongqi@gmail.com (corresponding author)
S. Wan is with School of Information and Safety Engineering, Zhongnan
University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China.
E-mail: shaohua.wan@ieee.org
M. Z. A. Bhuiyan is with the Department of Computer and Information
Sciences, Fordham University, New York, NY 10458 USA.
E-mail: zakirulalam@gmail.com
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However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be
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1
to cloud data center for supporting massive data analytics and
application execution [3].
However, with the continuous explosion and expansion of
IoT devices, a huge volume of raw data is generated [4].
According to a recent survey by Gartner, the total number
of connected devices in 2020 will reach 20.8 billion [5].
This proliferation of devices and associated data streams has
put a huge burden on IoT infrastructures [6]. Consequently,
it is inadequate to process computation tasks efficiently for
cloud computing on account of the ever-growing bandwidth
pressure resulted from data transmission [7]. On the other
side, the cloud is always placed in the center of the network
and remote from the IoT devices, which causes high latency
and transmission energy consumption [8]. In particular, cloud
computing is unsuitable for the IoT applications with real-time
restrictions, e.g., data processing in the Internet of Vehicles.
Even if there are no stringent timing constraints for the IoT
applications, uploading all the colossal data to remote cloud
directly also induce vast liability on the Internet [9].
A promising philosophy that emerges recently, i.e., edge
computing (EC), is powerful to solve the current problems
where resource provisioning are pushed from the cloud infras-
tructure to the edge of the Internet [10]. In the EC philosophy,
the smart IoT devices at the edge of the Internet are not
only the data producer but also service provider. Benefiting
from EC, an extensive scope of IoT devices resoundingly
gain the requested resources in real-time by migrating their
computation-intensive tasks to ECUs for execution, known as
computation offloading [11]. Computation offloading settles
the problem of latency and bandwidth efficiently, and improve
the quality and availability of the services provided by luxu-
rious IoT devices [12].
Nevertheless, since the data generated by the IoT devices
becomes more and more complex, ECUs need to withstand
more pressure inevitably. At the same time, the disclosure of
sensitive information is a great calamity, particularly in the
running of IoT [13]. During the transmission process from IoT
devices to ECUs, a series of unexpected leakages of sensitive
data, e.g., user location, telephone number, and personal
picture, makes the computation offloading more sophisticated
[14]. Although the applying of EC intellectualizes the use of
IoT devices, privacy information leakage still demands to be
considered as a critical problem [15]. With these observations,
it remains challenging to improve the implementation utility,
including the resource utilization and time consumption of
ECUs, and achieve privacy preservation simultaneously. Given
this challenge, a two-phase offloading optimization strategy is
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Things Journal
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL 2

designed to jointly optimize the offloading utility and ensure

privacy protection for EC enabled IoT. Cloud layer

The main contributions of this paper are summarized as:

• The ECUs resource utilization model and the time cost Edge layer
model are constituted under the IoT offloading architec- ...
ture in cloud-edge computing. ...
• A utility-aware computation offloading method, named
UTO, is devised first to obtain the goal of maximizing
the resource utilization of ECUs and minimizing the
implementation time cost. IoT layer ...
• A joint optimization method, named JOM, for utility
and privacy trade-offs is designed to balance the privacy
preservation and execution performance. - Cloud Data Center - Access Point - IoT Devices

• Conduct experimental evaluation and comparison analysis - Edge Server - Data Offloading - Edge Computing Unit

to illustrate the efficiency and reliability of our proposed

methods. Fig. 1: A system offloading architecture for IoT in cloud-edge
computing.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section II, we list the related work. Then, resource model
of utility-aware task offloading is defined in Section III. B. ECU Resource Utilization Model
The method dedicated to solve this model is proposed in
section IV. Furthermore, a joint optimization method for utility Resource utilization is a pivotal indicator to measure the
and privacy trade-offs is raised in section V. Experimental enforcement of the ECUs which can be reflected by the usage
evaluation is presented in Section VI. Eventually, conclusion of VM instances to a certain extent in the virtualized platforms
and future works are drawn in Section VII. [16]. In this paper, to efferently manage the heterogeneous
edge servers and answer the wide variety of task demands,
the virtualized technique is exercised. Denote αm as the total
II. R ELATE W ORK amount of VM instances for the m-th (m = 1, 2, ..., M ) edge
server sm . Benefiting from the virtualized technique, all the
Due to limited space in this paper, we have provided the edge servers in the same ECU can be treated as a big edge
related work in Appendix A of a supplementary file. server, then the total amount of available VM instances, i.e.,
the capacity of ECU, for cw (w = 1, 2, ..., W ) is calculated
by
III. S YSTEM D ESIGN M
X
w
λw = αm · δm , (1)
A. Offloading Architecture and Resource Model
m=1
Currently, the ever-evolving paradigms, including cloud where δmw
is a binary variable to estimate whether sm locates in
computing and edge computing have presented advantageous w
cw . Specifically, δm = 1 means sm locates in cw , and δm w
=0
power to improve the Quality of Service (QoS). To efficiently means sm dose not locates in cw .
provision the real-time services for the IoT applications, the
With the capacity of the ECUs, the resource utilization of
ECUs, with limited computing power, are placed dispersedly.
cw is deduced as
Fig. 1 reveals a system offloading architecture for IoT in cloud-
edge computing, consisted of three layers, i.e., IoT layer, edge M
1 XX
N
n w
layer and cloud layer. uw (X) = βn · fm (X) · δm , (2)
λw m=1 n=1
Denote the IoT devices collection as D = {d1 , d2 , · · · , dN },
where N is the total amount of devices in D. Hypothesize where βn is the demanded amount of VM instances for tn .
each IoT device submits just one task, the IoT tasks are At last, fmn
(X) stands for a binary variable aiming to judge
denoted as T = {t1 , t2 , · · · , tN }. Denote the ECU collection whether tn is hosted in sm , which is determined by
as C = {c1 , c2 , · · · , cW } where W is the total amount of
ECUs in C. Each ECU is composed of an access point (AP)

n 1, tn is deployed on sm ,
and multiple assembled edge servers. Accordingly, there are fm (X) = . (3)
0, otherwise.
W APs, denoted as P = {p1 , p2 , · · · , pW }, and M edge
servers, denoted as S = {s1 , s2 , · · · , sM }. The task mirrors Then to obtain the goal resource utilization of all the ECUs,
and carried information are transmitted to the edge servers the occupied volume of all the ECUs should be identified,
through the APs. denoted as γ(X), which is determined by
Invite X = {x1 , x2 , · · · , xN } to be the ultimate optimal W
deployment strategy for T , where xn ∈ C(n = {1, 2, · · · , N }) X
γ(X) = gw (X), (4)
is the location which the task tn is placed on eventually. w=1

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where gw (X) is used to mark the occupation status of cw , length, the amount of employed VMs, and the processing per-
defined by formance of each VM instances. The processing performance
 of each VM is denoted as p and the instruction length for tn
1, cw is occupied,
gw (X) = (5) is denoted as mipsn, then the time cost of process is obtained
0, otherwise.
by
With the resource utilization of each ECU by (2) and the N
X mipsn
total occupied amount of ECUs by (4), the average resource Kexe (X) = . (12)
λn · p
utilization of all the ECUs is acquired by n=1
PW After task processing, the corresponding result data will be
uw (X)
U (X) = w=1 . (6) generated, which should be transmitted to the IoT devices and
γ(X)
the data center. The feedback time of the results for tn from
C. Time Cost Model of Tasks in IoT the edge server to the IoT devices also consists of three parts
which are similar to the task transmission time. Denote πn as
Time cost for implementing the tasks is the main concern for the data size of the feedback results, then the three parts (i.e.,
the IoT customers [17] [18]. With shorter time consumption, the data transmission time from edge server to AP, the data
comes better QoS. The time consumption mainly comprises transmission time among APs, and the data transmission time
four parts, i.e., the migration cost through APs, the process from AP to the IoT device) of feedback time are calculated
time in the ECU, the feedback time for returning the result by
data, and the offloading time from edge servers to the cloud πn
ZnEA (xn ) = , (13)
data center. ωA2E
The migration time for the tasks to the target ECUs is
divided into three parts, i.e., the transmission time from IoT πn · (σn (xn ) + 1)
ZnAP (xn ) = (14)
device to AP, the transmission time among APs, and the ωA2A
transmission time from AP to edge server.
and
The transmission time of tn from the IoT device to AP is πn · (σn (xn ) + 1)
defined by ZnAP (xn ) = . (15)
θn ωA2A
KnDA (xn ) = , (7) Then the total data feedback time is determined by
ωD2A
where θn is the image size of tn needs migration and ωD2A Znreturn (xn ) = ZnDA (xn ) + ZnAP (xn ) + Ztrans
AE
(xn ). (16)
is the data transmission rate between the IoT device and AP.
The task image should be transferred across multiple APs The execution results also demand to be transmitted to the
from the original edge server to the destination one. Suppose cloud for storage, therefore the time of data transmission from
the amount of the passing APs is denoted as σn (xn ), then the the edge server to the cloud platform is calculated by
transmission time for tn to pass through APs is calculated by πn πn
GCloud
n (xn ) = + . (17)
θn · (σn (xn ) + 1) ωA2E ωA2C
KnAP (xn ) = , (8)
ωA2A As the feedback process from the edge servers to the IoT
where ωD2A is the data transmission rate between two con- devices is concurrent with the uploading process from the edge
nected APs. servers to the cloud, the overall data offloading time for tn is
Then the task image should be transmitted from the desti- calculated by
nation AP to the goal edge server. The relevant transmission Knof f (xn ) = max{Znreturn (xn ), GCloud (xn )}. (18)
n
time for tn is calculated by
θn Correspondingly, the total data offloading time for all the
AE
Ktrans (xn ) = , (9) tasks is defined by
ωA2E
N
where ωD2A is the data transmission rate from the edge server X
to AP. K of f (X) = Knof f (xn ). (19)
From (7), (8) and (9), the total time cost of transmission for n=1

tn from the IoT device to the target edge server is calculated In summary, the total amount of time consumption is
by calculated by
Kntrans (xn ) = KnDA (xn ) + KnAP (xn ) + Ktrans
AE
(xn ). (10) K(X) = K trans (X) + K of f (X). (20)
Then the overall time cost of transmission is calculated by
N IV. A U TILITY-AWARE TASK O FFLOADING M ETHOD
X
trans
K (X) = Kntrans (xn ). (11) In this section, a NSGA-III based utility-aware task offload-
n=1 ing method for EC enabled IoT, named UTO, is devised first
When the task image is transferred, the task starts execution to obtain the goal of maximizing the resource utilization of
immediately. The processing time is decided by the instruction ECUs and minimizing the implementation time cost.

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IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL
A. Objective Formulation
From the last section, the resource utilization and the total
time cost are defined. The purpose of this section is to accom-
plish the goal of maximizing the average resource utilization
and minimizing the total time consumption. The objective
problem in a formal way with the concomitant constraints is
defined as
max(U (X)), min(K(X)). (21)
N individual and the equal mutation probability of each gene.
X
n
s.t. βn · fm (X) < αm ,
n=1
W
X mutation is accomplished, the size of population is doubled.
0≤ gw (X) ≤ M
w=1
The constraint (22) means the summation of VMs demanded
by the tasks on the m-th ECU should meet the limit amount of
VMs on this ECU. The constraint (23) means the summation
of employed ECUs should be limited between 0 and M .
B. Utility-Aware Offloading Based on NSGA-III
As illustrated in (21), maximizing the average resource
utilization and minimizing the overall time consumption are
defined as an optimization problem with multiple objectives.
The NSGA-III algorithm is an efficient instrument for solving
multi-objective optimization problems [19]. In this section,
NSGA-III is applied to solve the defined problem. Due to
limited space in this paper, we have provided the procedure
of utility-aware offloading method based on NSGA-III in
Appendix B of a supplementary file.
1) Encoding: The offloading strategy for tasks is encoded
firstly. In genetic algorithm (GA), computation offloading
strategy is figured by gene, all of the genes compromise the
chromosome. A batch of genes constitutes a chromosome,
which indicates the selected outcome of the offloading strate-
gies.
2) Fitness Functions and Constraints: After the operation
of encoding, the fitness functions are leveraged as decision
criterions to identify appropriate solution. An individual chro-
mosome is a offloading strategy, which represents a viable
outcome of the objective problem we defined. Furthermore,
the fitness functions of objective problem involve two different
types: the average resource utilization for each ECU and
total time cost for each computing task, which are indicated
by (6) and (20) separately. The purpose of this algorithm
is to select the optimal solution to optimize the presented
fitness functions. In this method, in order to optimize the time
consumption and the resource utilization, a hybrid offloading
strategy is explored. The corresponding constraints are indi-
cated by (22) and (23).
3) Initialization: The related elements of genetic algorithm
is decided in the process of initialization, including the possi-
bility of mutation M P , the population size P Z, the crossover
possibility CP , and the maximum of iteration R. In the
parallel schedule of genetic algorithm, chromosome indicates
the collection of offloading strategies, which is denoted as
U Si = (us1 , us2 , ...usN ).
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Things Journal
4
4) Crossover and Mutation: The operation of crossover
is performed to produce new individuals by bonding two
chromosomes. That means two chromosomes exchange their
genes around a determined crossover point, which generates
the new chromosomes.
The operation of mutation changes the genes to produce
new individuals which has better values of fitness. Every gene
in the chromosome is altered with same probability. This
vital operation is leveraged to ensure the diversity of different
5) Selection: Selecting the chromosomes for the next popu-
(22)
lation is our primary purpose, which generates the individuals
of higher fitness values. When the operation of crossover and
(23)
In order to ensure the next generation, until the amount of the
picked solutions become two times of P Z, the solutions for
offspring are selected randomly in the largest non-domination
front. Through minimizing of the time consumption and max-
imizing of the resource utility, the fitness value of individuals
could be normalized.
After the operation of normalization, the fitness values of
the resource utilization and the time consumption are restricted
in [0,1). The feasible solutions for the offspring has achieved
a 2-dimensional hyperplane. Hence, in the 2-dimensional
hyperplane, a group of reference points with the normalized
solutions are divided. The solutions are legitimately sorted in
the non-dominated front, by the amount of related reference
points. All of the solutions are selected randomly with opti-
mum number of associated reference points repeatedly over
multiple runs until all the solutions have been picked. By
enforcing the operation of selection, the optimal solution are
selected for the descendant.
C. Offloading Strategy Selection Using SAW and MCDM
Due to limited space in this paper, we have provided this
subsection in Appendix C of a supplementary file.
D. UTO Overview
The overview of the NSGA-III based UTO is illustrated
in Algorithm 1 which demands the maximum of iteration R
and outputs the candidate computation offloading strategy X.
First, we obtain the tasks generated by the IoT devices at line
1. Then, crossover and mutation operation is activated at line
5 and 6, the calculation of the fitness functions is executed
at lines 7 to 10. After that, the optimal individuals for ensure
the offspring is picked at line 10. Furthermore, the maximum
utility values of the schedule strategy are calculated at line 14
and 15. The whole procedure is reproduced until the maximum
number of iterations are reached. Eventually, the candidate
strategy with higher fitness value is selected.
V. A J OINT O PTIMIZATION M ETHOD FOR U TILITY AND
P RIVACY T RADE -O FFS
Privacy data may be intercepted by the criminals advisedly
during the transmission of computing tasks, which results in
the sensitive data divulgation. In order to ensure the trans-
mission security of computation offloading for IoT devices,
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Algorithm 1 Generating candidate computation offloading Then, the correlation of tn,l and pn,l is demonstrated by
strategies by UTO    
tn tn,1 tn,2 · · · tn,l
Require: R = . (26)
Pn pn,1 pn,2 · · · pn,l
Ensure: X
1: Obtain computing tasks from IoT devices The average implementation time of l-th type of privacy
2: for i = 1 to I do data is calculated by
3: r=1 N L
while r <= R do 1 X X θn,l
4: K 0 (t) = pn,l (27)
5: Crossover operations to generate the offspring N n=1 ω
l=1
6: Mutation operations to ensure the offspring
7: for Individuals in population do where θn,l represent the size of l-th type data in computing
8: Calculate resource utilization by (1) to (6) task tn and ω is the data process rate from IoT devices to
9: Calculate total time consumption by (7) to (20) ECUs,
10: end for Invite Y = {y(t1 ), y(t1 ), · · · , y(tn )} to represent the value
11: Environmental selection operation to ensure the of entropy for the computing tasks collection in T . The privacy
offspring entropy value of tn is calculated as
12: r=r+1 L
X
13: end while y(tn ) = − pn,l · log2 pn,l . (28)
14: Evaluate utility value of the individuals with SAW and l=1
MCDM Therefore, the correlation of the optimal strategy X and the
15: Select the optimal solution entropy value Y is demonstrated by
16: end for    
17: return X X x1 x2 · · · xn
= . (29)
Y y(t1 ) y(t2 ) · · · y(tn )
Eventually, the summation of privacy entropy value of all
the computing tasks, which are waiting to be transmitted, are
transmitted data generated by the computing tasks placed in
divided into several parts. By this way, even if some parts
xn is obtained as
of the computing tasks are intercepted, the criminals could
obtain the whole information in the computing tasks. Entropy N
1 X
is actually a measure of disorder, with more types of data y(t) = y(tn ). (30)
N n=1
are cut, comes higher level of randomness. Higher the level
of randomness is, safer the computing computing tasks are.
However, the high entropy results in some problems such as B. Privacy Formulation
how to deploy the tasks in the same breath to improve the In this section, our purpose is to achieve the goal of
average resource utilization and transmission time. Therefore, maximizing the privacy entropy and minimizing the average
how to optimize the trade-off between the privacy entropy and transmission time of privacy data as possible as we can. The
the deployment strategy of computing tasks is resolved in this objective problem of formalization is defined as
section.
max(Y (t)), min(K 0 (t)), (31)
A. Privacy Entropy Model And the concomitant constraint is defined as
As described in section II , there are N IoT devices L
and computing tasks denoted as D and T respectively. The
X
s.t. pn,l = 1. (32)
relationship between the optimal strategy X and the placed l=1
computing tasks T is demonstrated by
   
X x1 x2 · · · xn VI. C OMPARISON AND A NALYSIS OF E XPERIMENTAL
= . (24)
T t1 t2 · · · tn RESULTS

Based on the theory of information entropy, the data of A. Experimental Context

computing task tn generated by the device dn solicit to be
transmitted is divided into L types to balance the data size and
calculate the probability of transmitting the l-th type data. De-
noted the divided data collection as tn = {tn,1 , tn,2 , · · · , tn,l },
where tn,l represents the l-th data of computing tasks tn
deployed in xn and λ represents the parameter of Poisson
distribution. The probability of delivering tn,l follows the
Poisson distribution which is defined by
λtn,l −λ
pn,l = e , l = 0, 1, 2, · · · , L.
tn,l !
In the experiment, the Shinelon Y-7000 PC is deployed
as the edge servers to form the ECUs. Main disposition of
this PC we choose are Intel Core I5-8400H with Turbo Boos
technology, 8 GB of Micron RAM, and 250GB of SAMSUNG
970 evo plus solid drive. In Table II, six vital notations
and the scope of the values applied in our experiment is
illustrated [20]. In order to accomplish the effectiveness of this
experiment, five different amount of IoT devices to produce
computing tasks with diverse scope. The numbers of IoT
(25) devices are set as 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 respectively.

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TABLE I: Key notations of employed VMs in each ECU and the number of used
ECUs. Fig. 3 describes the average resource utilization based
Notations Description Notations value
The amount of IoT devices 100,200,300,400,500
on Benchmark, NF, FF and UTO in different scales of tasks.
The amount of VMs on each server 7 It is clear that UTO performs well while NF method performs
The transmission rate between APs 450 Mbit/s worst in all scales of tasks. It is concluded that UTO max-
The transmission rate between AP and edge server 500 Mbit/s
The transmission rate between AP and data Center 550 Mbit/s
imizes the resource utilization of ECU, and the computing
The transmission data of VM [0.5GB,0.8GB] resources are saved.
The transmission data of VM [0.5GB,0.8GB]
The probability of delivering l-th type data [0, 1] 1.2
Benchmark
NF
1 FF

Average resource utilization

UTO

Aiming to ensure the comprehensiveness and impartiality 0.8

of this experiment, three basic methods are leveraged to make 0.6

comparisons with our UTO and JOM methods.
• Benchmark: Tasks is offloaded to the ECU that covers 0.4

the corresponding IoT devices. When the former ECU 0.2

has no enough idle space to perform next task, this task
is deployed on the following edge server. This procedure 0
100 200 300 400 500
is reproduced until all the tasks are offloaded. The number of tasks
• Next Fit (NF): Search the free location in next ECU every
Fig. 3: Comparison analysis of average resource utilization
times, deploy present task in this ECU. This procedure
with diverse task ranges by Benchmark, NF, FF and UTO.
is reproduced until all the tasks are offloaded [21].
• First Fit (FF): Search from the first free location in ECU,
deploy the task in this area that meets the requirements. 3) Total Time consumption: The total time cost consists
If this ECU still has enough room, then deploy next task of migration time, process time, feedback time and offloading
on it. This procedure is reproduced until all the tasks are time. The process time and the offloading time is equal, and the
offloaded [22]. two value is not evaluated. The total time affects the experience
of customers. In addition, the low latency is significant to the
Information industry. Based on the analyze of Fig. 4, the total
B. Performance Evaluation
time in our proposed method is 15.39, 31.83, 51.26, 62.12
1) The Amount of Employed ECUs: The amount of em- and 75.50 (s), and the total time is the least compared with
ployed ECUs by the methods Benchmark, NF, FF and UTO the other three methods.
are analyzed and compared in Fig. 2. It is distinct that the
employed ECUs by UTO is fewer compared with the other 100.00
three methods under any circumstances. When the number of 90.00
Benchmark
NF
the task is 100, the disparity between the four methods is thin. 80.00 FF
UAP
However, as the amount of tasks growth, the disparity between 70.00
Total Time 澻瀆澼

them becomes pronounced, which means that UTO performs 60.00

better. Based on the analysis, NF method performs worst, and 50.00

our proposed method UTO performs best. 40.00

30.00
600 20.00
Benchmark
NF 10.00
The number of employed ECUs

500 FF
UTO 0.00
100 200 300 400 500
400
The number of tasks

300

200
Fig. 4: Comparison analysis of total time cost with diverse
task ranges by Benchmark, NF, FF and UTO.
100

0 4) Migration Time consumption: Likewise, the migration

100 200 300
The number of tasks
Fig. 2: Comparison analysis of the amount of employed ECUs
with diverse task ranges by Benchmark, NF, FF and UTO.
2) Average Resource Utilization: The average resource
utilization, which is a significant standard on behalf of the
resource occupancy among ECUs, is calculated by the amount
400 500 time, which is an important part of the total time, needs
to be evaluated. Fig. 5 shows the comparison analysis of
migration time using Benchmark, NF, FF and UTO with
different scales of ECUs. The migration time indicates the time
consumed by the tasks migration between ECUs. Therefore,
the appropriate migration route, which needs to be optimized,
makes contributions to the migration time. Based on the
analyze of Fig. 2, the migration time in our optimization is

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2019.2944007, IEEE Internet of
Things Journal
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL 7

10.54, 22.06, 35.86, 42.56 and 54.31 (s), and the migration 180.00
Benchmark
time is the least compared with the other three methods. 160.00
NF
140.00 FF

Privavy Entropy
70.00 120.00 JOM
Benchmark
NF 100.00
60.00
FF
UTO 80.00
50.00
Migration Time (s)

60.00
40.00 40.00

30.00 20.00

0.00
20.00 100 200 300 400 500
The number of tasks
10.00
澳
0.00
100 200 300 400 500 Fig. 7: Comparison analysis of privacy entropy with diverse
The number of tasks task ranges by Benchmark, NF, FF, and JOM.
Fig. 5: Comparison analysis of migration time cost with
diverse task ranges by Benchmark, NF, FF and UTO.
VII. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
5) Feedback Time consumption: The calculation of feed- In this paper, we focus on the investigation of the of-
back time is approximately one-fifth of the migration time. The floading problem considering the implementation utility (i.e.,
feedback time is used to indicate that the tasks are transmitted the resource utilization of ECUs and the time cost for task
back. If the feedback time equals 0, the tasks, which have been execution). To achieve the trade-offs of utility and privacy,
processed, are not transmitted back to the first ECU. With the a two-phase offloading strategy has been designed. In the
growth of the value of the computing tasks, the diversity of the first phase, we selected the utility-aware offloading strategy
four methods has not become bigger. Based on the analyze of by using NSGA-III to achieve the optimization of utilization
Fig. 6, the migration time in our method is 2.11, 4.41, 7.17, and time cost. Then in the second phase, the utility and the
8.51 and 10.27 (s). The feedback time also costs the least privacy entropy have been both taken into consideration as
compared with Benchmark, NF and FF methods. two main metrics to be optimized at same time. For future
work, we will continue to improve and extend UTO and JOM
to be applied in real world environment. Besides, the privacy-
14.00
Benchmark aware offloading problem in edge computing for 5G will be
NF
12.00 FF investigated.
UTO
10.00
Feedback Time 澻瀆澼

8.00
VIII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
6.00
This research is supported by the National Natural Sci-
ence Foundation of China under grant no. 61702277 and
4.00
no. 61872219, the Priority Academic Program Development
2.00 of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD) fund, and
0.00 Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center on Atmospheric En-
100 200 300 400 500 vironment and Equipment Technology (CICAEET).
The number of tasks

Fig. 6: Comparison analysis of feedback time cost with diverse R EFERENCES

task ranges by Benchmark, NF, FF and UTO.
6) Privacy Entropy: We compare the privacy entropy cal-
culated in JOM. It is obvious that JOM performs better than
the Benchmark, NF and FF in terms of privacy entropy. The
privacy entropy indicates the security of the transmission. As
the value of the privacy entropy increases, the security will
increase too. Based on the analysis in Fig. 7, with the growth
of the tasks scales, the privacy entropy grows linearly. The
concrete value of privacy entropy engendered by JOM is 31.72,
63.00, 94.05, 125.23 and 156.20 when the number of tasks is
100, 200, 300, 400 and 500, respectively.
7) Utility Value: Due to limited space in this paper, we have
provided this subsection in Appendix D of a supplementary
file.
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Xiaolong Xu received Ph.D. degree from the Nan-
jing University, China, in 2016. He worked as a
research scholar at Michigan State University, USA,
from Apr. 2017 to May 2018. He is currently an
assistant professor at the school of computer and
software, Nanjing University of Information Science
and Technology. He has published more than 60
peer review papers in the international journals and
conferences, including TCC, TETCI, TCSS, TBD,
JNCA, SPE, CCPE, FGCS, ICWS, ICSOC, etc.
His research interests include fog computing, edge
computing, IoT, cloud computing and big data.
Chengxun He received his B.S. in Computer Sci-
ence and Technology Engineering from Nanjing
University of Information Science and Technology
in 2019. He is currently studying for his masters
degree in Computer Science and Technology in Nan-
jing University of Information Science and Technol-
ogy. His areas of interest are mobile computing, big
data, cloud computing and machine learning.
2327-4662 (c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
8
Zhanyang XU received Ph.D. degree from the Nan-
jing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
China, in 2011. He worked as a research scholar at
Arizona State University, USA, from May. 2014 to
June 2015. He is currently an associate professor
at the school of computer and software, Nanjing
University of Information Science and Technology.
He has published more than 15 papers in the in-
ternational journals and conferences. His research
澳
interests include Software Engineering, IoT, cloud
computing and big data.
Lianyong Qi received his PhD degree in Department
of Computer Science and Technology from Nanjing
University, China, in 2011. Now, he is an asso-
ciate professor of the School of Information Science
and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Education
Big Data, Qufu Normal University, China. He has
already published more than 50 papers including
JSAC, TCC, TBD, FGCS, JCSS, CCPE, ICWS and
ICSOC, etc. His research interests include services
computing, big data and IoT.
Shaohua Wan received the joint Ph.D. degree from
the School of Computer, Wuhan University and the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Northwestern University, USA in 2010.
Since 2015, he has been holding a post-doctoral
position at the State Key Laboratory of Digital Man-
ufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong
University of Science and Technology. From 2016
to 2017, he was a visiting professor at with the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Technical University of Munich, Germany. He is
currently an Associate Professor with the School of Information and Safety
Engineering, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law. His main research
interests include deep learning for Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical
Systems. He is an author of over 60 peer-reviewed research papers and books.
He is a senior member of IEEE.
Md Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan (M’09-SM’17) is cur-
rently an Assistant Professor of the Department of
Computer and Information Sciences at the Fordham
University, NY, USA, the Founding Director of
Fordham Dependable and Secure System Lab (De-
pendSys). Earlier, he worked as an Assistant Profes-
sor at the Temple University. His research focuses on
dependability, cybersecurity, big data, and IoT/CPS
Applications. His work in these areas published in
top-tier venues, including IEEE TC, TPDS, TDSC,
澳
TII, COMMAG, IoT-J, ACM TOSN, TAAS, CS,
INF, INS, JSA, JNCA, and so on. He has served as a guest/associate editor for
IEEE (TII, TBD, TCC, IoT-J), ACM (TOMM, TCPS), INS, FGCS, JNCA, and
so on. He has been an ESI Highly Cited Researcher (since 2017) and received
numerous awars, including the IEEE TCSC Early Career Researcher, the
IEEE Outstanding Leadership Award. and IEEE Service Award. He has also
served as an organizer, general chair, program chair, workshop chair, and TPC
member of various international conferences, including IEEE INFOCOM. He
is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM.