Understanding the Performance of Task Offloading for Wearables in a Two-Tier Edge Architecture

The development of small form-factor handheld electronics is pacing the personal devices market, followed by the increasing number of various applications. Some of those applications also cover computation-hungry use-cases, such as image or video processing and compression, among others. Historically, wearable and handheld devices were not designed to execute computationally intensive operations for reasons ranging from limited battery capacity to radiated heat. Offloading computationally heavy tasks to a comparatively more powerful and less energy-dependent device can help prolong the battery lifetime of a wearable. This paper analyzes different task offloading scenarios from the wearable to a device located at the network edge. Such a device can be a smartphone paired with the wearable or an edge server co-located with the cellular base station. A comprehensive performance evaluation conducted under a wide variety of realistic settings in terms of task demands, processing capabilities, and data rate, unveils the circumstances in which offloading is convenient and when it is not, in terms of meaningful metrics.