No Arabic abstract
The (ultra-)dense deployment of small-cell base stations (SBSs) endowed with cloud-like computing functionalities paves the way for pervasive mobile edge computing (MEC), enabling ultra-low latency and location-awareness for a variety of emerging mobile applications and the Internet of Things. To handle spatially uneven computation workloads in the network, cooperation among SBSs via workload peer offloading is essential to avoid large computation latency at overloaded SBSs and provide high quality of service to end users. However, performing effective peer offloading faces many unique challenges in small cell networks due to limited energy resources committed by self-interested SBS owners, uncertainties in the system dynamics and co-provisioning of radio access and computing services. This paper develops a novel online SBS peer offloading framework, called OPEN, by leveraging the Lyapunov technique, in order to maximize the long-term system performance while keeping the energy consumption of SBSs below individual long-term constraints. OPEN works online without requiring information about future system dynamics, yet provides provably near-optimal performance compared to the oracle solution that has the complete future information. In addition, this paper formulates a novel peer offloading game among SBSs, analyzes its equilibrium and efficiency loss in terms of the price of anarchy in order to thoroughly understand SBSs strategic behaviors, thereby enabling decentralized and autonomous peer offloading decision making. Extensive simulations are carried out and show that peer offloading among SBSs dramatically improves the edge computing performance.
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) pushes computing functionalities away from the centralized cloud to the proximity of data sources, thereby reducing service provision latency and saving backhaul network bandwidth. Although computation offloading has been extensively studied in the literature, service caching is an equally, if not more, important design topic of MEC, yet receives much less attention. Service caching refers to caching application services and their related data (libraries/databases) in the edge server, e.g. MEC-enabled Base Station (BS), enabling corresponding computation tasks to be executed. Since only a small number of services can be cached in resource-limited edge server at the same time, which services to cache has to be judiciously decided to maximize the system performance. In this paper, we investigate collaborative service caching in MEC-enabled dense small cell (SC) networks. We propose an efficient decentralized algorithm, called CSC (Collaborative Service Caching), where a network of small cell BSs optimize service caching collaboratively to address a number of key challenges in MEC systems, including service heterogeneity, spatial demand coupling, and decentralized coordination. Our algorithm is developed based on parallel Gibbs sampling by exploiting the special structure of the considered problem using graphing coloring. The algorithm significantly improves the time efficiency compared to conventional Gibbs sampling, yet guarantees provable convergence and optimality. CSC is further extended to the SC network with selfish BSs, where a coalitional game is formulated to incentivize collaboration. A coalition formation algorithm is developed by employing the merge-and-split rules and ensures the stability of the SC coalitions.
Mobile-edge computing (MEC) and wireless power transfer are technologies that can assist in the implementation of next generation wireless networks, which will deploy a large number of computational and energy limited devices. In this letter, we consider a point-to-point MEC system, where the device harvests energy from the access points (APs) transmitted signal to power the offloading and/or the local computation of a task. By taking into account the non-linearities of energy harvesting, we provide analytical expressions for the probability of successful computation and for the average number of successfully computed bits. Our results show that a hybrid scheme of partial offloading and local computation is not always efficient. In particular, the decision to offload and/or compute locally, depends on the systems parameters such as the distance to the AP and the number of bits that need to be computed.
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is considered as an efficient method to relieve the computation burden of mobile devices. In order to reduce the energy consumption and time delay of mobile devices (MDs) in MEC, multiple users multiple input and multiple output (MU-MIMO) communications is considered to be applied to the MEC system. The purpose of this paper is to minimize the weighted sum of energy consumption and time delay of MDs by jointly considering the offloading decision and MU-MIMO beamforming problems. And the resulting optimization problem is a mixed-integer non-linear programming problem, which is NP-hard. To solve the optimization problem, a semidefinite relaxation based algorithm is proposed to solve the offloading decision problem. Then, the MU-MIMO beamforming design problem is handled with a newly proposed fractional programming method. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can effectively reduce the energy consumption and time delay of the computation offloading.
In this article, we consider the problem of relay assisted computation offloading (RACO), in which user A aims to share the results of computational tasks with another user B through wireless exchange over a relay platform equipped with mobile edge computing capabilities, referred to as a mobile edge relay server (MERS). To support the computation offloading, we propose a hybrid relaying (HR) approach employing two orthogonal frequency bands, where the amplify-and-forward scheme is used in one band to exchange computational results, while the decode-and-forward scheme is used in the other band to transfer the unprocessed tasks. The motivation behind the proposed HR scheme for RACO is to adapt the allocation of computing and communication resources both to dynamic user requirements and to diverse computational tasks. Within this framework, we seek to minimize the weighted sum of the execution delay and the energy consumption in the RACO system by jointly optimizing the computation offloading ratio, the bandwidth allocation, the processor speeds, as well as the transmit power levels of both user $A$ and the MERS, under practical constraints on the available computing and communication resources. The resultant problem is formulated as a non-differentiable and nonconvex optimization program with highly coupled constraints. By adopting a series of transformations and introducing auxiliary variables, we first convert this problem into a more tractable yet equivalent form. We then develop an efficient iterative algorithm for its solution based on the concave-convex procedure. By exploiting the special structure of this problem, we also propose a simplified algorithm based on the inexact block coordinate descent method, with reduced computational complexity. Finally, we present numerical results that illustrate the advantages of the proposed algorithms over state-of-the-art benchmark schemes.
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged as a promising technology to release the tension between computation-intensive applications and resource-limited mobile terminals (MTs). In this paper, we study the delay-optimal computation offloading in computation-constrained MEC systems. We consider the computation task queue at the MEC server due to its constrained computation capability. In this case, the task queue at the MT and that at the MEC server are strongly coupled in a cascade manner, which creates complex interdependencies and brings new technical challenges. We model the computation offloading problem as an infinite horizon average cost Markov decision process (MDP), and approximate it to a virtual continuous time system (VCTS) with reflections. Different to most of the existing works, we develop the dynamic instantaneous rate estimation for deriving the closed-form approximate priority functions in different scenarios. Based on the approximate priority functions, we propose a closed-form multi-level water-filling computation offloading solution to characterize the influence of not only the local queue state information (LQSI) but also the remote queue state information (RQSI). A extension is provided from single MT single MEC server scenarios to multiple MTs multiple MEC servers scenarios and several insights are derived. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional schemes.