With recent advancements in edge computing capabilities, there has been a
significant increase in utilizing the edge cloud for event-driven and
time-sensitive computations. However, large-scale edge computing networks can
suffer substantially from unpredictable and unreliable computing resources
which can result in high variability of service quality. Thus, it is crucial to
design efficient task scheduling policies that guarantee quality of service and
the timeliness of computation queries. In this paper, we study the problem of
computation offloading over unknown edge cloud networks with a sequence of
timely computation jobs. Motivated by the MapReduce computation paradigm, we
assume each computation job can be partitioned to smaller Map functions that
are processed at the edge, and the Reduce function is computed at the user
after the Map results are collected from the edge nodes. We model the service
quality (success probability of returning result back to the user within
deadline) of each edge device as function of context (collection of factors
that affect edge devices). The user decides the computations to offload to each
device with the goal of receiving a recoverable set of computation results in
the given deadline. Our goal is to design an efficient edge computing policy in
the dark without the knowledge of the context or computation capabilities of
each device. By leveraging the \emph{coded computing} framework in order to
tackle failures or stragglers in computation, we formulate this problem using
contextual-combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CC-MAB), and aim to maximize the
cumulative expected reward. We propose an online learning policy called
\emph{online coded edge computing policy}, which provably achieves
asymptotically-optimal performance in terms of regret loss compared with the
optimal offline policy for the proposed CC-MAB problem