To overcome devices' limitations in performing computation-intense applications, mobile edge computing (MEC) enables users to offload tasks to proximal MEC servers for faster task computation. However, current MEC system design is based on average-based metrics, which fails to account for the ultra-reliable low-latency requirements in mission-critical applications. To tackle this, this paper proposes a new system design, where probabilistic and statistical constraints are imposed on task queue lengths, by applying extreme value theory. The aim is to minimize users' power consumption while trading off the allocated resources for local computation and task offloading. Due to wireless channel dynamics, users are re-associated to MEC servers in order to offload tasks using higher rates or accessing proximal servers. In this regard, a user-server association policy is proposed, taking into account the channel quality as well as the servers' computation capabilities and workloads. By marrying tools from Lyapunov optimization and matching theory, a two-timescale mechanism is proposed, where a user-server association is solved in the long timescale while a dynamic task offloading and resource allocation policy is executed in the short timescale. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by guaranteeing highly-reliable task computation and lower delay performance, compared to several baselines.
The emergence of computation intensive on-vehicle applications poses a significant challenge to provide the required computation capacity and maintain high performance. Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is a new computing paradigm with a high potential to improve vehicular services by offloading computation-intensive tasks to the VEC servers. Nevertheless, as the computation resource of each VEC server is limited, offloading may not be efficient if all vehicles select the same VEC server to offload their tasks. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose offloading with resource allocation…
Mobile-Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm that provides a capillary distribution of cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the wireless access network, enabling rich services and applications in close proximity to the end users. In this article, a MEC enabled multi-cell wireless network is considered where each Base Station (BS) is equipped with a MEC server that can assist mobile users in executing computation-intensive tasks via task offloading. The problem of Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation (JTORA) is studied in order to maximize the users' task offloading gains…
In this paper, we study the joint computation offloading and resource allocation problem in the two-tier wireless heterogeneous network (HetNet). Our design aims to optimize the computation offloading to the cloud jointly with the subchannel allocation to minimize the maximum (min-max) weighted energy consumption subject to practical constraints on bandwidth, computing resource and allowable latency for the multi-user multitask computation system. To tackle this non-convex mixed integer non-linear problem (MINLP), we employ the bisection search method to solve it where we propose a novel appro…
We consider a heterogeneous network with mobile edge computing, where a user can offload its computation to one among multiple servers. In particular, we minimize the system-wide computation overhead by jointly optimizing the individual computation decisions, transmit power of the users, and computation resource at the servers. The crux of the problem lies in the combinatorial nature of multi-user offloading decisions, the complexity of the optimization objective, and the existence of inter-cell interference. Then, we decompose the underlying problem into two subproblems: i) the offloading dec…
In multi-tiered fog computing systems, to accelerate the processing of computation-intensive tasks for real-time IoT applications, resource-limited IoT devices can offload part of their workloads to nearby fog nodes, whereafter such workloads may be offloaded to upper-tier fog nodes with greater computation capacities. Such hierarchical offloading, though promising to shorten processing latencies, may also induce excessive power consumptions and latencies for wireless transmissions. With the temporal variation of various system dynamics, such a trade-off makes it rather challenging to conduct …
While mobile edge computing (MEC) alleviates the computation and power limitations of mobile devices, additional latency is incurred when offloading tasks to remote MEC servers. In this work, the power-delay tradeoff in the context of task offloading is studied in a multi-user MEC scenario. In contrast with current system designs relying on average metrics (e.g., the average queue length and average latency), a novel network design is proposed in which latency and reliability constraints are taken into account. This is done by imposing a probabilistic constraint on users' task queue lengths an…
In order to support communication and computation cooperation, we propose ME-RAN architecture, which consists of mobile edge cloud (ME) as the computation provision platform and radio access network (RAN) as the communication interface. Cooperative offloading framework is proposed to achieve the following tasks: (1) to increase user equipment' (UE') computing capacity by triggering offloading action, especially for the UE which cannot complete the computation locally; (2) to reduce the energy consumption for all the UEs by considering limited computing and communication resources. Based on abo…
Achieving an end-to-end low-latency for computations offloading, in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) systems, is still a critical design problem. This is because the offloading of computational tasks via the MEC servers entails the use of uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) radio links that are usually assumed to be coupled to a single base station (BS). However, for heterogeneous networks, a new architectural paradigm whereby UL and DL are not associated with the same BS is proposed and seen to provide gains in network throughput due to the improved UL performance. Motivated by such gains, and by using …
In mobile computation offloading (MCO), mobile devices (MDs) can choose to either execute tasks locally or to have them executed on a remote edge server (ES). This paper addresses the problem of assigning both the wireless communication bandwidth needed, along with the ES capacity that is used for the task execution, so that task completion time constraints are satisfied. The objective is to obtain these allocations so that the average power consumption of the mobile devices is minimized, subject to a cost budget constraint. The paper includes contributions for both soft and hard task completi…
For in-vehicle application, the vehicles with different speeds have different delay requirements. However, vehicle speeds have not been extensively explored, which may cause mismatching between vehicle speed and its allocated computation and wireless resource. In this paper, we propose a vehicle speed aware task offloading and resource allocation strategy, to decrease the energy cost of executing tasks without exceeding the delay constraint. First, we establish the vehicle speed aware delay constraint model based on different speeds and task types. Then, the delay and energy cost of task execu…
Network function Virtualization (NFV) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) are promising 5G technologies to support resource-demanding mobile applications. In NFV, one must process the service function chain (SFC) in which a set of network functions must be executed in a specific order. Moreover, the MEC technology enables computation offloading of service requests from mobile users to remote servers to potentially reduce energy consumption and processing delay for the mobile application. This paper considers the optimization of the computation offloading, resource allocation, and SFC placement in …
Based on the two decision variables, service location and base station selection, construct a computational model of the switching delay, communication delay, and queuing delay patterns of a mobile edge computing system in each time horizon; minimize the non-switching latency to obtain the service deployment and base station selection decision at the initial time horizon; compute the switching latency and non-switching latency of the current time horizon based on the decision of the previous time horizon, and determine the current time horizon based on the principle of larger non-switching lat…
Vehicular edge computing (VEC) becomes a promising paradigm for the development of emerging intelligent transportation systems. Nevertheless, the limited resources and massive transmission demands bring great challenges on implementing vehicular applications with stringent deadline requirements. This work presents a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based architecture in VEC, where heterogeneous edge nodes are cooperated for real-time task processing. We derive a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) transmission model by considering both intra-edge and inter-edge interferences and formulate a c…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has attracted great interests as a promising approach to augment computational capabilities of mobile devices. An important issue in the MEC paradigm is computation offloading. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for computation offloading and interference management in wireless cellular networks with mobile edge computing. In this integrated framework, the MEC server makes the offloading decision according to the local computation overhead estimated by all user equipments (UEs) and the offloading overhead estimated by the MEC server itself. Then, the …
In this paper, we jointly optimize computation offloading and resource allocation to minimize the weighted sum of energy consumption of all mobile users in a backhaul limited cooperative MEC system with multiple fog servers. Considering the partial offloading strategy and TDMA transmission at each base station, the underlying optimization problem with constraints on maximum task latency and limited computation resource at mobile users and fog servers is non-convex. We propose to convexify the problem exploiting the relationship among some optimization variables from which an optimal algorithm …
The huge amount of data generated by the Internet of things (IoT) devices needs the computational power and storage capacity provided by cloud, edge, and fog computing paradigms. Each of these computing paradigms has its own pros and cons. Cloud computing provides enhanced data storage and computing power but causes high communication latency. Edge and fog computing provide similar services with lower latency but with limited capacity, capability, and coverage. A single computing paradigm cannot fulfil all the requirements of IoT devices and a federation between them is needed to extend their …
Edge computing (EC) is a promising paradigm providing a distributed computing solution for users at the edge of the network. Preserving satisfactory quality of experience (QoE) for users when offloading their computation to EC is a non-trivial problem. Computation offloading in EC requires jointly optimizing access points (APs) allocation and edge service placement for users, which is computationally intractable due to its combinatorial nature. Moreover, users are self-interested, and they can misreport their preferences leading to inefficient resource allocation and network congestion. In thi…
Southeast University（东南大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
The fog radio access network (F-RAN) is a promising technology in which the user mobile devices (MDs) can offload computation tasks to the nearby fog access points (F-APs). Due to the limited resource of F-APs, it is important to design an efficient task offloading scheme. In this paper, by considering time-varying network environment, a dynamic computation offloading and resource allocation problem in F-RANs is formulated to minimize the task execution delay and energy consumption of MDs. To solve the problem, a federated deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based algorithm is proposed, where th…
We propose a novel edge computing network architecture that enables edge nodes to cooperate in sharing computing and radio resources to minimize the total energy consumption of mobile users while meeting their delay requirements. To find the optimal task offloading decisions for mobile users, we first formulate the joint task offloading and resource allocation optimization problem as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP). The optimization involves both binary (offloading decisions) and real variables (resource allocations), making it an NP-hard and computational intractable problem. T…
The Internet of Things (IoT) devices are highly reliant on cloud systems to meet their storage and computational demands. However, due to the remote location of cloud servers, IoT devices often suffer from intermittent Wide Area Network (WAN) latency which makes execution of delay-critical IoT applications inconceivable. To overcome this, service providers (SPs) often deploy multiple fog nodes (FNs) at the network edge that helps in executing offloaded computations from IoT devices with improved user experience. As the FNs have limited resources, matching IoT services to FNs while ensuring min…
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) emerges as an essential part of the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) and future beyond-5G mobile communication systems. It adds computational power towards the edge of cellular networks, much closer to energy-constrained user devices, and therewith allows the users to offload tasks to the edge computing nodes for low-latency applications with very-limited battery consumption. However, due to the high dynamics of user demand and server load, task congestion may occur at the edge nodes resulting in long queuing delay. Such delays can significantly degrade the qual…
Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in Low-Altitude MEC via Graph Attention Diffusion
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机学院）；School of Cyber Engineering, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学电子工程学院）；Center for 6G Technology, Khalifa University of Science and Technology（卡塔尔科学技术大学6G技术中心）；School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电子与电气工程学院）
In this paper, we consider a mobile-edge computing system, where an access point assists a mobile device (MD) to execute an application consisting of multiple tasks following a general task call graph. The objective is to jointly determine the offloading decision of each task and the resource allocation under time-varying wireless fading channels and stochastic edge computing capability, so that the energy-time cost (ETC) of the MD is minimized. Solving the problem is particularly hard due to the combinatorial offloading decisions and the strong coupling among task executions under the general…
The integration between the satellite network and the terrestrial network will play a key role in the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) of mobile cellular networks thanks to the wide coverage and bandwidth offered by satellite networks. To leverage this integration, we propose a proactive traffic offloading scheme in an integrated multi-satellite terrestrial network (IMSTN) that considers the future networks' heterogeneity and predicts their variability. Our proposed offloading scheme hinges on traffic prediction to answer the stringent requirements of data-rate, latency and reliability imposed b…
Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) assisted multi-access edge computing (MEC) systems emerged as a promising solution for providing computation services to mobile users outside of terrestrial infrastructure coverage. As each UAV operates independently, however, it is challenging to meet the computation demands of the mobile users due to the limited computing capacity at the UAV's MEC server as well as the UAV's energy constraint. Therefore, collaboration among UAVs is needed. In this paper, a collaborative multi-UAV-assisted MEC system integrated with a MEC-enabled terrestrial base stat…
With the emergence of millimeter-Wave (mmWave) communication technology, the capacity of mobile backhaul networks can be significantly increased. On the other hand, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) provides an appropriate infrastructure to offload latency-sensitive tasks. However, the amount of resources in MEC servers is typically limited. Therefore, it is important to intelligently manage the MEC task offloading by optimizing the backhaul bandwidth and edge server resource allocation in order to decrease the overall latency of the offloaded tasks. This paper investigates the task allocation probl…
In mobile edge computing (MEC) systems, edge service caching refers to pre-storing the necessary programs for executing computation tasks at MEC servers. At resource-constrained edge servers, service caching placement is in general a complicated problem that highly correlates to the offloading decisions of computation tasks. In this paper, we consider a single edge server that assists a mobile user (MU) in executing a sequence of computation tasks. In particular, the MU can run its customized programs at the edge server, while the server can selectively cache the previously generated programs …
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is one of the promising solutions to process computational-intensive tasks for the emerging time-critical Internet-of-Things (IoT) use cases, e.g., virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), autonomous vehicle. The latency can be reduced further, when a task is partitioned and computed by multiple edge servers' (ESs) collaboration. However, the state-of-the-art work studies the MEC-enabled offloading based on a static framework, which partitions tasks at either the local user equipment (UE) or the primary ES. The dynamic selection between the two offloading schem…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged for reducing energy consumption and latency by allowing mobile users to offload computationally intensive tasks to the MEC server. Due to the spectrum reuse in small cell network, the inter-cell interference has a great effect on MEC performances. In this paper, for reducing the energy consumption and latency of MEC, we propose a game theory based approach to join task offloading decision and resources allocation together in the MEC system. In this algorithm, the offloading decision, the CPU capacity adjustment, the transmission power control, and the ne…
With the rapid growth of mobile traffic demand, a promising approach to relieve cellular network congestion is to offload users' traffic to small-cell networks. In this paper, we investigate how the mobile users (MUs) can effectively offload traffic by taking advantage of the capability of dual-connectivity, which enables an MU to simultaneously communicate with a macro base station (BS) and a small-cell access point (AP) via two radio-interfaces. Offloading traffic to the AP usually reduces the MUs' mobile data cost, but often at the expense of suffering increased interferences from other MUs…
Next-generation communication networks are expected to integrate newly-used technologies in a smart way to ensure continuous connectivity in rural areas and to alleviate the traffic load in dense regions. The prospective access network in 6G should hinge on satellite systems to take advantage of their wide coverage and high capacity. However, adopting satellites in 6G could be hindered because of the additional latency introduced, which is not tolerable by all traffic types. Therefore, we propose a traffic offloading scheme that integrates both the satellite and terrestrial networks to smartly…
In this paper, we propose a novel resource management scheme that jointly allocates the transmit power and computational resources in a centralized radio access network architecture. The network comprises a set of computing nodes to which the requested tasks of different users are offloaded. The optimization problem minimizes the energy consumption of task offloading while takes the end-to-end latency, i.e., the transmission, execution, and propagation latencies of each task, into account. We aim to allocate the transmit power and computational resources such that the maximum acceptable latenc…
The heterogeneity in cellular networks that comprise multiple base stations types imposes new challenges in network planning and deployment. The Radio Resource Management (RRM) techniques, such as dynamic sharing of the available resources and advanced user association strategies determine the overall network capacity and the network/spectrum efficiency. This paper evaluates the downlink performance of a two-tier heterogeneous LTE network (consisting of macro and femto tiers) in terms of rate distribution, i.e. the percentage of users that achieve certain rate in the system. The paper specific…
An edge computing environment features multiple edge servers and multiple service clients. In this environment, mobile service providers can offload client-side computation tasks from service clients' devices onto edge servers to reduce service latency and power consumption experienced by the clients. A critical issue that has yet to be properly addressed is how to allocate edge computing resources to achieve two optimization objectives: 1) minimize the service cost measured by the service latency and the power consumption experienced by service clients; and 2) maximize the service capacity me…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emerging communication scheme that aims at reducing latency. In this paper, we investigate a green MEC system under the existence of an eavesdropper. We use computation efficiency, which is defined as the total number of bits computed divided by the total energy consumption, as our main metric. To alleviate stringent latency requirement, a joint secure offloading and computation model is proposed. Additionally, we formulate an optimization problem for maximizing computation efficiency, under several practical constraints. The non-convex problem is tackled by s…
