<p>Advancements in smart applications highlight the need for increased processing and storage capacity at Smart Devices (SDs). To tackle this, Edge computing (EC) is enabled to offload SD workloads to distant edge servers. So, a variety of offloading strategies are offered in previous research to enhance the efficiency of SDs by offloading their workloads to neighboring cloudlets or distant cloud computing resources. Consequently, optimization techniques are crucial for scheduling computation offloading tasks in (ED) networks. To the greatest extent of current understanding, an extensive analysis of meta-heuristic-based computation offloading (CO) techniques in the EC has not been systematically surveyed. This systematic survey creates an inventory of CO in EC and further summarizes the most advanced recently available EC technologies. In this survey, three types of optimization techniques are examined: Lyapunov, Meta-heuristic, and Convex. The objective functions, application domains, offloading methods, evaluation techniques, merits, and demerits of the existing algorithms are summarized. The proposed survey undergoes four main CO processes: task scheduling, priority-aware task scheduling, load balancing, and edge server selection. In addition, this research provides a comparative analysis of the offloading techniques. Subsequently, unresolved problems and upcoming unfocused or inadequately covered research tasks are explored.</p>