Energy harvesting aided mobile edge computing (MEC) has gained much attention for its widespread application in the computation-intensive, latency-sensitive and energy-hungry scenario. In this paper, computation offloading from multi-MD to multi-MEC-s in heterogeneous MEC systems with energy harvesting is investigated from a game theoretic perspective. The objective is to minimize the average response time of an MD that consists of communication time, waiting time and processing time. M/G/1 queueing models are established for MDs and MEC-ss. The interference among MDs, the randomness in computation task generation, harvested energy arrival, wireless channel state, queueing at the MEC-s, and the power budget constraint of an MD are taken into consideration. A noncooperative computation offloading game is formulated. We give the definition and existence analysis of the Nash equilibrium (NE). Furthermore, we reconstruct the optimization problem of an MD. A 2-step decomposition is presented and performed. Thereby, we arrive at a one-dimensional search problem and a greatly shrunken sub-problem. We can obtain the optimal solution of the sub-problem by seeking the finite solutions of its Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. Thereafter, a distributive NE-orienting iterated best-response algorithm is designed. Simulations are carried out to illustrate the convergence performance and parameter effect.
Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm to meet the ever-increasing computation demands from mobile applications. By offloading the computationally intensive workloads to the MEC server, the quality of computation experience, e.g., the execution latency, could be greatly improved. Nevertheless, as the on-device battery capacities are limited, computation would be interrupted when the battery energy runs out. To provide satisfactory computation performance as well as achieving green computing, it is of significant importance to seek renewable energy sources to power mobile devices v…
Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is a promising technology to enable real-time information transmission and computing by offloading computation tasks from wireless devices to network edge.
This letter considers a multi-access mobile edge computing (MEC) network consisting of multiple users, multiple base stations, and a malicious eavesdropper. Specifically, the users adopt the partial offloading strategy by partitioning the computation task into several parts. One is executed locally and the others are securely offloaded to multiple MEC servers integrated into the base stations by leveraging the physical layer security to combat the eavesdropping. We jointly optimize power allocation, task partition, subcarrier allocation, and computation resource to maximize the secrecy offload…
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 point's (AP's) 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 numb…
By allowing a mobile device to offload computation-intensive tasks to a base station, mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising solution for saving the mobile device's energy. In real applications, the offloading may span multiple fading blocks. In this paper, we investigate energy-efficient offloading over multiple fading blocks with random channel gains. An optimization problem is formulated, which optimizes the amount of data for offloading to minimize the total expected energy consumption of the mobile device. Although the formulated optimization problem is non-convex, we prove that the o…
Wireless network optimization has been becoming very challenging as the problem size and complexity increase tremendously, due to close couplings among network entities with heterogeneous service and resource requirements. By continuously interacting with the environment, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a mechanism for different network entities to build knowledge and make autonomous decisions to improve network performance. In this article, we first review typical DRL approaches and recent enhancements. We then discuss the applications of DRL for mobile edge computing (MEC), which …
Energy-efficient computation is an inevitable trend for mobile edge computing (MEC) networks. Resource allocation strategies for maximizing the computation efficiency are critically important. In this paper, computation efficiency maximization problems are formulated in wireless-powered MEC networks under both partial and binary computation offloading modes. A practical non-linear energy harvesting model is considered. Both time division multiple access (TDMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are considered and evaluated for offloading. The energy harvesting time, the local computing …
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 computa…
Mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) is an emerging technology for enhancing mobiles' computation capabilities and prolonging their battery lives, by offloading intensive computation from mobiles to nearby servers such as base stations. In this paper, we study the energy-efficient resource-management policy for the asynchronous MECO system, where the mobiles have heterogeneous input-data arrival time instants and computation deadlines. First, we consider the general case with arbitrary arrival-deadline orders. Based on the monomial energy-consumption model for data transmission, an optimi…
With the emergence of diverse mobile applications (such as augmented reality), the quality of experience of mobile users is greatly limited by their computation capacity and finite battery lifetime. Mobile edge computing (MEC) and wireless power transfer are promising to address this issue. However, these two techniques are susceptible to propagation delay and loss. Motivated by the chance of short-distance line-of-sight achieved by leveraging unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications, an UAV-enabled wireless powered MEC system is studied. A power minimization problem is formulated subject …
Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a prominent technique to provide mobile services with high computation requirement, by migrating the computation-intensive tasks from the mobile devices to the nearby MEC servers. To reduce the execution latency and device energy consumption, in this paper, we jointly optimize task offloading scheduling and transmit power allocation for MEC systems with multiple independent tasks. A low-complexity sub-optimal algorithm is proposed to minimize the weighted sum of the execution delay and device energy consumption based on alternating minimization. Speci…
Mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) offloads intensive mobile computation to clouds located at the edges of cellular networks. Thereby, MECO is envisioned as a promising technique for prolonging the battery lives and enhancing the computation capacities of mobiles. In this paper, we consider resource allocation in a MECO system comprising multiple users that time share a single edge cloud and have different computation loads. The optimal resource allocation is formulated as a convex optimization problem for minimizing the weighted sum mobile energy consumption under constraint on computa…
This paper studies a new mobile edge computing (MEC) setup where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is served by cellular ground base stations (GBSs) for computation offloading. The UAV flies between a give pair of initial and final locations, during which it needs to accomplish certain computation tasks by offloading them to some selected GBSs along its trajectory for parallel execution. Under this setup, we aim to minimize the UAV's mission completion time by optimizing its trajectory jointly with the computation offloading scheduling, subject to the maximum speed constraint of the UAV, and th…
Mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) has been recognized as a promising solution to alleviate the burden of resource-limited Internet of Thing (IoT) devices by offloading computation tasks to the edge of cellular networks (also known as {\em cloudlet}). Specifically, latency-critical applications such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have inherent collaborative properties since part of the input/output data are shared by different users in proximity. In this paper, we consider a multi-user fog computing system, in which multiple single-antenna mobile users running applic…
In this paper, we propose a novel offloading learning approach to compromise energy consumption and latency in multi-tier network with mobile edge computing. In order to solve this integer programming problem, instead of using conventional optimization tools, we apply a cross entropy approach with iterative learning of the probability of elite solution samples. Compared to existing methods, the proposed one in this network permits a parallel computing architecture and is verified to be computationally very efficient. Specifically, it achieves performance close to the optimal and performs well …
In this paper, a multi-vehicle multi-task nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) system with passive eavesdropping vehicles is investigated. To heighten the performance of edge vehicles, we propose a vehicle grouping pairing method, which utilizes vehicles near the MEC as full-duplex relays to assist edge vehicles. For promoting transmission security, we employ artificial noise to interrupt eavesdropping vehicles. Furthermore, we derive the approximate expression of secrecy outage probability of the system. The combined optimization of vehicle task division, …
This paper considers the coexistence of two important communication techniques, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and mobile edge computing (MEC). Both NOMA uplink and downlink transmissions are applied to MEC, and analytical results are developed to demonstrate that the use of NOMA can efficiently reduce the latency and energy consumption of MEC offloading. In addition, various asymptotic studies are carried out to reveal the impact of the users' channel conditions and transmit powers on the application of NOMA to MEC is quite different to those in conventional NOMA scenarios. Computer si…
This paper studies a wireless powered mobile edge computing (MEC) system with fluctuating channels and dynamic task arrivals over time. We jointly optimize the transmission energy allocation at the energy transmitter (ET) for WPT and the task allocation at the user for local computing and offloading over a particular finite horizon, with the objective of minimizing the total transmission energy consumption at the ET while ensuring the user's successful task execution. First, in order to characterize the fundamental performance limit, we consider the offline optimization by assuming that the pe…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been envisaged as a promising technique in the next-generation wireless networks. In order to improve the security of computation tasks offloading and enhance user connectivity, physical layer security and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are studied in MEC-aware networks. The secrecy outage probability is adopted to measure the secrecy performance of computation offloading by considering a practically passive eavesdropping scenario. The weighted sum-energy consumption minimization problem is firstly investigated subject to the secrecy offloading rate const…
In this paper, we study a mobile edge computing (MEC) system in which the mobile device is assisted by a base station (BS) and a cooperative node. The mobile device has sequential tasks to complete, whereas the cooperative node assists the mobile device on both task offloading and task computation. In specific, two cases are investigated, which are 1) the cooperative node has no tasks to complete itself, and 2) the cooperative node has tasks to complete itself. Our target is to minimize the total energy consumption of the mobile device and the cooperative node through optimizing the transmit d…
Mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) offloads intensive mobile computation to clouds located at the edges of cellular networks. Thereby, MECO is envisioned as a promising technique for prolonging the battery lives and enhancing the computation capacities of mobiles. In this paper, we study resource allocation for a multiuser MECO system based on time-division multiple access (TDMA) and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). First, for the TDMA MECO system with infinite or finite computation capacity, the optimal resource allocation is formulated as a convex optimization pr…
By offloading intensive computation tasks to the edge cloud located at the cellular base stations, mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) has been regarded as a promising means to accomplish the ambitious millisecond-scale end-to-end latency requirement of the fifth-generation networks. In this paper, we investigate the latency-minimization problem in a multi-user time-division multiple access MECO system with joint communication and computation resource allocation. Three different computation models are studied, i.e., local compression, edge cloud compression, and partial compression offlo…
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…
This paper considers a scenario in which an access point (AP) is equipped with a mobile edge server of finite computing power, and serves multiple resource-hungry mobile users by charging users a price. Pricing provides users with incentives in offloading. However, existing works on pricing are based on abstract concave utility functions (e.g, the logarithm function), giving no dependence on physical layer parameters. To that end, we first introduce a novel utility function, which measures the cost reduction by offloading as compared with executing jobs locally. Based on this utility function …
We consider a mobile cloud computing system with multiple users, a remote cloud server, and a computing access point (CAP). The CAP serves both as the network access gateway and a computation service provider to the mobile users. It can either process the received tasks from mobile users or offload them to the cloud. We jointly optimize the offloading decisions of all users, together with the allocation of computation and communication resources, to minimize the overall cost of energy consumption, computation, and maximum delay among users. The joint optimization problem is formulated as a mix…
In this paper, we investigate rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) aided mobile edge computing (MEC) in a cognitive radio network. We propose a RSMA scheme that enables the secondary user to offload tasks to the MEC server utilizing dynamic rate splitting without deteriorating the primary user's offloading. The expressions for the optimal rate splitting parameters that maximize the achievable rate for the secondary user and successful computation probability of the proposed RSMA scheme are derived in closed-form. We formulate a problem to maximize successful computation probability by jointly…
In this paper, a salary-plus-bonus incentive mechanism is proposed to motivate WiFi Access Points (APs) to provide data offloading service for mobile network operators (MNOs). Under the proposed salary-plus-bonus scheme, WiFi APs are rewarded not only based on offloaded data volume but also based on the quality of their offloading service. The interactions between WiFi APs and the MNO under this incentive mechanism are then studied using Stackelberg game. By differentiating whether WiFi APs are of the same type (e.g. offloading cost and quality), two cases (homogeneous and heterogeneous) are s…
Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is an emerging technology for enhancing the computational capabilities of mobile devices and reducing their energy consumption via offloading complex computation tasks to the nearby servers. Multiuser MEC at servers is widely realized via parallel computing based on virtualization. Due to finite shared I/O resources, interference between virtual machines (VMs), called I/O interference, degrades the computation performance. In this paper, we study the problem of joint radio-and-computation resource allocation (RCRA) in multiuser MEC systems in the presence of I/O int…
This paper studies a wireless powered mobile edge computing (MEC) system with device-to-device (D2D)-enabled task offloading. In this system, a set of distributed multi-antenna energy transmitters (ETs) use collaborative energy beamforming to wirelessly charge multiple users. By using the harvested energy, the actively computing user nodes can offload their computation tasks to nearby idle users (as helper nodes) via D2D communication links for self-sustainable remote computing. We consider the frequency division multiple access (FDMA) protocol, such that the D2D communications of different us…
Mobile-edge computing (MEC) offloads computational tasks from wireless devices to network edge, and enables real-time information transmission and computing. Most existing work concerns a small-scale synchronous MEC system. In this paper, we focus on a large-scale asynchronous MEC system with random task arrivals, distinct workloads, and diverse deadlines. We formulate the offloading policy design as a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) to maximize the total discounted reward over the time horizon. However, the formulated RMAB is related to a PSPACE-hard sequential decision-making problem, whi…
WiFi offloading is regarded as one of the most promising techniques to deal with the explosive data increase in cellular networks due to its high data transmission rate and low requirement on devices. In this paper, we investigate the mobile data offloading problem through a third-party WiFi access point (AP) for a cellular mobile system. From the cellular operator's perspective, by assuming a usage-based charging model, we formulate the problem as a utility maximization problem. In particular, we consider three scenarios: (i) successive interference cancellation (SIC) available at both the ba…
The conventional designs of mobile computation offloading fetch user-specific data to the cloud prior to computing, called offline prefetching. However, this approach can potentially result in excessive fetching of large volumes of data and cause heavy loads on radio-access networks. To solve this problem, the novel technique of live prefetching is proposed in this paper that seamlessly integrates the task-level computation prediction and prefetching within the cloud-computing process of a large program with numerous tasks. The technique avoids excessive fetching but retains the feature of lev…
We consider a general multi-user Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) system where each mobile user has multiple independent tasks. These mobile users share the computation and communication resources while offloading tasks to the cloud. We study both the conventional MCC where tasks are offloaded to the cloud through a wireless access point, and MCC with a computing access point (CAP), where the CAP serves both as the network access gateway and a computation service provider to the mobile users. We aim to jointly optimize the offloading decisions of all users as well as the allocation of computation …
Resource allocation is investigated for offloading computational-intensive tasks in multi-hop mobile edge computing (MEC) system. The envisioned system has both the cooperative access points (AP) with the computing capability and the MEC servers. A user-device (UD) therefore first uploads a computing task to the nearest AP, and the AP can either locally process the received task or offload to MEC server. In order to utilize the radio resource blocks (RRBs) in the APs efficiently, we exploit the non-orthogonal multiple access for offloading the tasks from the UDs to the AP(s). For the considere…
Due to the spectrum reuse in small cell network, the inter-cell interference has great effect on MEC's performance. In this paper, for reducing the energy consumption and latency of MEC, we propose a game theory based jointing offloading decision and resource allocation algorithm for multi-user MEC. In this algorithm, the transmission power, offloading decision, and mobile user's CPU capability are determined jointly. We prove that this game is an exact potential game and the NE of this game exists and is unique. For reaching the NE, the best response dynamic is applied. We calculate the best …
Technological evolution of mobile user equipments (UEs), such as smartphones or laptops, goes hand-in-hand with evolution of new mobile applications. However, running computationally demanding applications at the UEs is constrained by limited battery capacity and energy consumption of the UEs. Suitable solution extending the battery life-time of the UEs is to offload the applications demanding huge processing to a conventional centralized cloud (CC). Nevertheless, this option introduces significant execution delay consisting in delivery of the offloaded applications to the cloud and back plus …
Deploying mobile edge computing (MEC) server in the mobile blockchain-enabled Internet of things (IoT) system is a promising approach to improve the system performance, however, it imposes a significant challenge on the trust of MEC server. To address this problem, we first propose an untrusted MEC proof of work scheme in mobile blockchain network where plenty of nonce hash computing demands can be offloaded to MEC server. Then, we design a nonce ordering algorithm for this scheme to provide fairer computing resource allocation for all mobile IoT devices/users. Specifically, we formulate the u…
This paper considers a full-duplex (FD) mobile-edge computing (MEC) system with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and energy harvesting (EH), where one group of users simultaneously offload task data to the base station (BS) via NOMA and the BS simultaneously receive data and broadcast energy to other group of users with FD. We aim at minimizing the total energy consumption of the system via power control, time scheduling and computation capacity allocation. To solve this nonconvex problem, we first transform it into an equivalent problem with less variables. The equivalent problem is show…
This paper studies a multiuser mobile edge computing (MEC) system, in which one base station (BS) serves multiple users with intensive computation tasks. We exploit the multi-antenna non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique for multiuser computation offloading, such that different users can simultaneously offload their computation tasks to the multi-antenna BS over the same time/frequency resources, and the BS can employ successive interference cancellation (SIC) to efficiently decode all users' offloaded tasks for remote execution. We aim to minimize the weighted sum-energy consumption…
An emerging requirement for 5G systems is the ability to provide wireless ultra-reliable communication (URC) services with close-to-full availability for cloud-based applications. Among such applications, a prominent role is expected to be played by mobile cloud computing (MCC), that is, by the offloading of computationally intensive tasks from mobile devices to the cloud. MCC allows battery-limited devices to run sophisticated applications, such as for gaming or for the "tactile" internet. This paper proposes to apply the framework of reliable service composition to the problem of optimal tas…
In this paper, the problem of joint radio and computation resource management over multi-channel is investigated for multi-user partial offloading mobile edge computing (MEC) system. The target is to minimize the weighted sum of energy consumption by jointly optimizing transmission time, local and edge computation capacity allocation, bandwidth allocation and data partition. An optimization problem is formulated, which is nonconvex and can not be solved directly. Then, we transform the origin optimization problem into an equivalent convex optimization problem. For general case of multi-user mu…
Achieving long battery lives or even self sustainability has been a long standing challenge for designing mobile devices. This paper presents a novel solution that seamlessly integrates two technologies, mobile cloud computing and microwave power transfer (MPT), to enable computation in passive low-complexity devices such as sensors and wearable computing devices. Specifically, considering a single-user system, a base station (BS) either transfers power to or offloads computation from a mobile to the cloud; the mobile uses harvested energy to compute given data either locally or by offloading.…
This letter investigates a cache-enabled multiuser mobile edge computing (MEC) system with dynamic task arrivals, taking into account the impact of proactive cache placement on the system's overall energy consumption. We consider that an access point (AP) schedules a wireless device (WD) to offload computational tasks while executing the tasks of a finite library in the \emph{task caching} phase, such that the nearby WDs with the same task request arriving later can directly download the task results in the \emph{task arrival and execution} phase. We aim for minimizing the system's weighted-su…
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) (a.k.a. fog computing) has recently emerged to enable low-latency and location-aware data processing at the edge of mobile networks. Since providing grid power supply in support of MEC can be costly and even infeasible in some scenarios, on-site renewable energy is mandated as a major or even sole power supply. Nonetheless, the high intermittency and unpredictability of energy harvesting creates many new challenges of performing effective MEC. In this paper, we develop an algorithm called GLOBE that performs joint geographical load balancing (GLB) and admission cont…
In this paper, we consider a multi-user mobile edge computing (MEC) network powered by wireless power transfer (WPT), where each energy-harvesting WD follows a binary computation offloading policy, i.e., data set of a task has to be executed as a whole either locally or remotely at the MEC server via task offloading. In particular, we are interested in maximizing the (weighted) sum computation rate of all the WDs in the network by jointly optimizing the individual computing mode selection (i.e., local computing or offloading) and the system transmission time allocation (on WPT and task offload…
Through simultaneous energy and information transfer, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) reduces the energy consumption of the wireless networks. It also provides a new approach for the wireless devices to share each other's energy storage, without relying on the power grid or traffic offloading. In this paper, we study RF energy harvesting enabled power balancing within the decode-and-forward (DF) relaying-enhanced cooperative wireless system. An optimal power allocation policy is proposed for the scenario where both source and relay nodes can draw power from the radio frequency sign…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) can enhance the computing capability of mobile devices, and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) can provide high data rates. Combining these two technologies can effectively benefit the network with spectrum and energy efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the task completion time minimization in NOMA multiuser MEC networks, where multiple users can offload their tasks simultaneously via the same frequency band. We adopt the \emph{partial} offloading, in which each user can partition its computation task into offloading computing and locally computing parts. W…
A Novel Deep Reinforcement Learning Method for Computation Offloading in Multi-User Mobile Edge Computing with Decentralization
School of Information and Communications Technology, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam（河内科学技术大学信息与通信学院）；Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hanoi Open University, Vietnam（河内开放大学电子与电气工程学院）；Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology Hanoi, Vietnam（河内邮电技术研究所）；Faculty of Informatics, University of Debrecen, Hungary（德布勒恩大学信息学院）
Data compression has the potential to significantly improve the computation offloading performance in hierarchical fog-cloud systems. However, it remains unknown how to optimally determine the compression ratio jointly with the computation offloading decisions and the resource allocation. This joint optimization problem is studied in the current paper where we aim to minimize the maximum weighted energy and service delay cost (WEDC) of all users. First, we consider a scenario where data compression is performed only at the mobile users. We prove that the optimal offloading decisions have a thr…
Cellular networks are overloaded due to the mobile traffic surge, and mobile social network (MSNets) carrying information flow can help reduce cellular traffic load. If geographically-nearby users directly adopt WiFi or Bluetooth technology (i.e., leveraging proximity-based communication) for information spreading in MSNets, a portion of mobile traffic can be offloaded from cellular networks. For many delay-tolerant applications, it is beneficial for traffic offloading to pick some seed users as information sources, which help further spread the information to others in an epidemic-like manner…
This paper considers non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted mobile edge computing (MEC), where the power and time allocation is jointly optimized to reduce the energy consumption of offloading. Closed-form expressions for the optimal power and time allocation solutions are obtained and used to establish the conditions for determining whether conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA), pure NOMA or hybrid NOMA should be used for MEC offloading.
Scavenging the idling computation resources at the enormous number of mobile devices can provide a powerful platform for local mobile cloud computing. The vision can be realized by peer-to-peer cooperative computing between edge devices, referred to as co-computing. This paper considers a co-computing system where a user offloads computation of input-data to a helper. The helper controls the offloading process for the objective of minimizing the user's energy consumption based on a predicted helper's CPU-idling profile that specifies the amount of available computation resource for co-computin…
Computation offloading becomes useful for users of limited computing power and mobile edge computing (MEC) can help mobile users perform their tasks more effectively. In this paper, we consider MEC when users perform tasks with local data as well as data at cloud storage servers, since users can often keep their data at cloud storage servers or have tasks that need to use public datasets. An optimization problem to minimize the total consumed energy of users as well as a base station (BS) is formulated with a total transmission time constraint, which is solved by converting into multiple binar…
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…
