XR Offloading Across Multiple Time Scales: The Roles of Power, Temperature, and Energy

Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 2025

Extended reality (XR) devices, commonly known as wearables, must handle significant computational loads under tight latency constraints. To meet these demands, they rely on a combination of on-device processing and edge offloading. This letter focuses on offloading strategies for wearables and assesses the impact of offloading decisions over three distinct time scales: instantaneous power consumption, short-term temperature fluctuations, and long-term battery duration. We introduce a comprehensive system model that captures these temporal dynamics, and propose a stochastic and stationary offloading strategy, called TAO (for temperature-aware offloading), designed to minimize the offloading cost while adhering to power, thermal, and energy constraints. Our performance evaluation, leveraging COMSOL models of real-world wearables, confirms that TAO successfully avoids exceeding temperature limits while keeping additional edge offloading to a minimum. These results also highlight how properly accounting for all features of wearables allows fully exploiting edge offloading opportunities.