GenACO a multi-objective cached data offloading optimization based on genetic algorithm and ant colony optimization

Background: Data exchange and management have been observed to be improving with the rapid growth of 5G technology, edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Moreover, edge computing is expected to quickly serve extensive and massive data requests despite its limited storage capacity. Such a situation needs data caching and offloading capabilities for proper distribution to users. These capabilities also need to be optimized due to the experience constraints, such as data priority determination, limited storage, and execution time.

Methods: We proposed a novel framework called Genetic and Ant Colony Optimization (GenACO) to improve the performance of the cached data optimization implemented in previous research by providing a more optimum objective function value. GenACO improves the solution selection probability mechanism to ensure a more reliable balancing of the exploration and exploitation process involved in finding solutions. Moreover, the GenACO has two modes: cyclic and non-cyclic, confirmed to have the ability to increase the optimal cached data solution, improve average solution quality, and reduce the total time consumption from the previous research results.

Result: The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed GenACO outperformed the previous work by minimizing the objective function of cached data optimization from 0.4374 to 0.4350 and reducing the time consumption by up to 47%.