Knowledge Distillation for Mobile Edge Computation Offloading

Edge computation offloading allows mobile end devices to execute compute-inten?sive tasks on edge servers. End devices can decide whether the tasks are offloaded to edge servers, cloud servers or executed locally according to current network condition and devic?es'profiles in an online manner. In this paper, we propose an edge computation offloading framework based on deep imitation learning (DIL) and knowledge distillation (KD), which assists end devices to quickly make fine-grained decisions to optimize the delay of computa?tion tasks online. We formalize a computation offloading problem into a multi-label classifi?cation problem. Training samples for our DIL model are generated in an offline manner. Af?ter the model is trained, we leverage KD to obtain a lightweight DIL model, by which we fur?ther reduce the model's inference delay. Numerical experiment shows that the offloading de?cisions made by our model not only outperform those made by other related policies in laten?cy metric, but also have the shortest inference delay among all policies.

Secure Computation Efficiency Resource Allocation for Massive MIMO-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Networks

In this article,the secure computation efficiency(SCE)problem is studied in a massive multipleinput multiple-output(mMIMO)-assisted mobile edge computing(MEC)network.We first derive the secure transmission rate based on the mMIMO under imperfect channel state information.Based on this,the SCE maximization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing the local computation frequency,the offloading time,the downloading time,the users and the base station transmit power.Due to its difficulty to directly solve the formulated problem,we first transform the fractional objective function into the subtractive form one via the dinkelbach method.Next,the original problem is transformed into a convex one by applying the successive convex approximation technique,and an iteration algorithm is proposed to obtain the solutions.Finally,the stimulations are conducted to show that the performance of the proposed schemes is superior to that of the other schemes.

Air-Ground Collaborative Mobile Edge Computing:Architecture,Challenges,and Opportunities

By pushing computation,cache,and network control to the edge,mobile edge computing(MEC)is expected to play a leading role in fifth generation(5G)and future sixth generation(6G).Nevertheless,facing ubiquitous fast-growing computational demands,it is impossible for a single MEC paradigm to effectively support high-quality intelligent services at end user equipments(UEs).To address this issue,we propose an air-ground collaborative MEC(AGCMEC)architecture in this article.The proposed AGCMEC integrates all potentially available MEC servers within air and ground in the envisioned 6G,by a variety of collaborative ways to provide computation services at their best for UEs.Firstly,we introduce the AGC-MEC architecture and elaborate three typical use cases.Then,we discuss four main challenges in the AGC-MEC as well as their potential solutions.Next,we conduct a case study of collaborative service placement for AGC-MEC to validate the effectiveness of the proposed collaborative service placement strategy.Finally,we highlight several potential research directions of the AGC-MEC.

UAV-assisted cooperative offloading energy efficiency system for mobile edge computing

Reliable communication and intensive computing power cannot be provided effectively by temporary hot spots in disaster areas and complex terrain ground infrastructure.Mitigating this has greatly developed the application and integration of UAV and Mobile Edge Computing(MEC)to the Internet of Things(loT).However,problems such as multi-user and huge data flow in large areas,which contradict the reality that a single UAV is constrained by limited computing power,still exist.Due to allowing UAV collaboration to accomplish complex tasks,cooperative task offloading between multiple UAVs must meet the interdependence of tasks and realize parallel processing,which reduces the computing power consumption and endurance pressure of terminals.Considering the computing requirements of the user terminal,delay constraint of a computing task,energy constraint,and safe distance of UAV,we constructed a UAV-Assisted cooperative offloading energy efficiency system for mobile edge computing to minimize user terminal energy consumption.However,the resulting optimization problem is originally nonconvex and thus,difficult to solve optimally.To tackle this problem,we developed an energy efficiency optimization algorithm using Block Coordinate Descent(BCD)that decomposes the problem into three convex subproblems.Furthermore,we jointly optimized the number of local computing tasks,number of computing offloaded tasks,trajectories of UAV,and offloading matching relationship between multi-UAVs and multiuser terminals.Simulation results show that the proposed approach is suitable for different channel conditions and significantly saves the user terminal energy consumption compared with other benchmark schemes.

IRS Assisted UAV Communications against Proactive Eavesdropping in Mobile Edge Computing Networks

In this paper,we consider mobile edge computing(MEC)networks against proactive eavesdropping.To maximize the transmission rate,IRS assisted UAV communications are applied.We take the joint design of the trajectory of UAV,the transmitting beamforming of users,and the phase shift matrix of IRS.The original problem is strong non-convex and difficult to solve.We first propose two basic modes of the proactive eavesdropper,and obtain the closed-form solution for the boundary conditions of the two modes.Then we transform the original problem into an equivalent one and propose an alternating optimization(AO)based method to obtain a local optimal solution.The convergence of the algorithm is illustrated by numerical results.Further,we propose a zero forcing(ZF)based method as sub-optimal solution,and the simulation section shows that the proposed two schemes could obtain better performance compared with traditional schemes.

Energy-Optimal and Delay-Bounded Computation Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing with Heterogeneous Clouds

By Mobile Edge Computing(MEC), computation-intensive tasks are offloaded from mobile devices to cloud servers, and thus the energy consumption of mobile devices can be notably reduced. In this paper, we study task offloading in multi-user MEC systems with heterogeneous clouds, including edge clouds and remote clouds. Tasks are forwarded from mobile devices to edge clouds via wireless channels, and they can be further forwarded to remote clouds via the Internet. Our objective is to minimize the total energy consumption of multiple mobile devices, subject to bounded-delay requirements of tasks. Based on dynamic programming, we propose an algorithm that minimizes the energy consumption, by jointly allocating bandwidth and computational resources to mobile devices. The algorithm is of pseudo-polynomial complexity. To further reduce the complexity, we propose an approximation algorithm with energy discretization, and its total energy consumption is proved to be within a bounded gap from the optimum. Simulation results show that, nearly 82.7% energy of mobile devices can be saved by task offloading compared with mobile device execution.

Intelligent Task Offloading and Collaborative Computation in Multi-UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing

This article establishes a three-tier mobile edge computing(MEC) network, which takes into account the cooperation between unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs). In this MEC network, we aim to minimize the processing delay of tasks by jointly optimizing the deployment of UAVs and offloading decisions,while meeting the computing capacity constraint of UAVs. However, the resulting optimization problem is nonconvex, which cannot be solved by general optimization tools in an effective and efficient way. To this end, we propose a two-layer optimization algorithm to tackle the non-convexity of the problem by capitalizing on alternating optimization. In the upper level algorithm, we rely on differential evolution(DE) learning algorithm to solve the deployment of the UAVs. In the lower level algorithm, we exploit distributed deep neural network(DDNN) to generate offloading decisions. Numerical results demonstrate that the two-layer optimization algorithm can effectively obtain the near-optimal deployment of UAVs and offloading strategy with low complexity.

Deep Q-Learning Based Computation Offloading Strategy for Mobile Edge Computing

To reduce the transmission latency and mitigate the backhaul burden of the centralized cloud-based network services,the mobile edge computing(MEC)has been drawing increased attention from both industry and academia recently.This paper focuses on mobile users’computation offloading problem in wireless cellular networks with mobile edge computing for the purpose of optimizing the computation offloading decision making policy.Since wireless network states and computing requests have stochastic properties and the environment’s dynamics are unknown,we use the modelfree reinforcement learning(RL)framework to formulate and tackle the computation offloading problem.Each mobile user learns through interactions with the environment and the estimate of its performance in the form of value function,then it chooses the overhead-aware optimal computation offloading action(local computing or edge computing)based on its state.The state spaces are high-dimensional in our work and value function is unrealistic to estimate.Consequently,we use deep reinforcement learning algorithm,which combines RL method Q-learning with the deep neural network(DNN)to approximate the value functions for complicated control applications,and the optimal policy will be obtained when the value function reaches convergence.Simulation results showed that the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with baseline methods in terms of total overheads of all mobile users.

GCAGA: A Gini Coefficient-Based Optimization Strategy for Computation Offloading in Multi-User-Multi-Edge MEC System

To support the explosive growth of Information and Communications Technology(ICT),Mobile Edge Comput-ing(MEC)provides users with low latency and high bandwidth service by offloading computational tasks to the network’s edge.However,resource-constrained mobile devices still suffer from a capacity mismatch when faced with latency-sensitive and compute-intensive emerging applications.To address the difficulty of running computationally intensive applications on resource-constrained clients,a model of the computation offloading problem in a network consisting of multiple mobile users and edge cloud servers is studied in this paper.Then a user benefit function EoU(Experience of Users)is proposed jointly considering energy consumption and time delay.The EoU maximization problem is decomposed into two steps,i.e.,resource allocation and offloading decision.The offloading decision is usually given by heuristic algorithms which are often faced with the challenge of slow convergence and poor stability.Thus,a combined offloading algorithm,i.e.,a Gini coefficient-based adaptive genetic algorithm(GCAGA),is proposed to alleviate the dilemma.The proposed algorithm optimizes the offloading decision by maximizing EoU and accelerates the convergence with the Gini coefficient.The simulation compares the proposed algorithm with the genetic algorithm(GA)and adaptive genetic algorithm(AGA).Experiment results show that the Gini coefficient and the adaptive heuristic operators can accelerate the convergence speed,and the proposed algorithm performs better in terms of convergence while obtaining higher EoU.The simulation code of the proposed algorithm is available:https://github.com/Grox888/Mobile_Edge_Computing/tree/GCAGA.

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Task Offloading and Service Migrating Policies in Service Caching-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing

Emerging mobile edge computing(MEC)is considered a feasible solution for offloading the computation-intensive request tasks generated from mobile wireless equipment(MWE)with limited computational resources and energy.Due to the homogeneity of request tasks from one MWE during a longterm time period,it is vital to predeploy the particular service cachings required by the request tasks at the MEC server.In this paper,we model a service caching-assisted MEC framework that takes into account the constraint on the number of service cachings hosted by each edge server and the migration of request tasks from the current edge server to another edge server with service caching required by tasks.Furthermore,we propose a multiagent deep reinforcement learning-based computation offloading and task migrating decision-making scheme(MBOMS)to minimize the long-term average weighted cost.The proposed MBOMS can learn the near-optimal offloading and migrating decision-making policy by centralized training and decentralized execution.Systematic and comprehensive simulation results reveal that our proposed MBOMS can converge well after training and outperforms the other five baseline algorithms.

Online Learning-Based Offloading Decision and Resource Allocation in Mobile Edge Computing-Enabled Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

Mobile edge computing(MEC)-enabled satellite-terrestrial networks(STNs)can provide Internet of Things(IoT)devices with global computing services.Sometimes,the network state information is uncertain or unknown.To deal with this situation,we investigate online learning-based offloading decision and resource allocation in MEC-enabled STNs in this paper.The problem of minimizing the average sum task completion delay of all IoT devices over all time periods is formulated.We decompose this optimization problem into a task offloading decision problem and a computing resource allocation problem.A joint optimization scheme of offloading decision and resource allocation is then proposed,which consists of a task offloading decision algorithm based on the devices cooperation aided upper confidence bound(UCB)algorithm and a computing resource allocation algorithm based on the Lagrange multiplier method.Simulation results validate that the proposed scheme performs better than other baseline schemes.

Energy Minimization for Heterogenous Traffic Coexistence with Puncturing in Mobile Edge Computing-Based Industrial Internet of Things

Puncturing has been recognized as a promising technology to cope with the coexistence problem of enhanced mobile broadband(eMBB) and ultra-reliable low latency communications(URLLC)traffic. However, the steady performance of eMBB traffic while meeting the requirements of URLLC traffic with puncturing is a major challenge in some realistic scenarios. In this paper, we pay attention to the timely and energy-efficient processing for eMBB traffic in the industrial Internet of Things(IIoT), where mobile edge computing(MEC) is employed for data processing. Specifically, the performance of eMBB traffic and URLLC traffic in a MEC-based IIoT system is ensured by setting the threshold of tolerable delay and outage probability, respectively. Furthermore,considering the limited energy supply, an energy minimization problem of eMBB device is formulated under the above constraints, by jointly optimizing the resource blocks(RBs) punctured by URLLC traffic, data offloading and transmit power of eMBB device. With Markov's inequality, the problem is reformulated by transforming the probabilistic outage constraint into a deterministic constraint. Meanwhile, an iterative energy minimization algorithm(IEMA) is proposed.Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm has a significant reduction in the energy consumption for eMBB device and achieves a better overall effect compared to several benchmarks.

Energy Efficiency Maximization in Mobile Edge Computing Networks via IRS assisted UAV Communications

In this paper,we investigate the energy efficiency maximization for mobile edge computing(MEC)in intelligent reflecting surface(IRS)assisted unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)communications.In particular,UAVcan collect the computing tasks of the terrestrial users and transmit the results back to them after computing.We jointly optimize the users’transmitted beamforming and uploading ratios,the phase shift matrix of IRS,and the UAV trajectory to improve the energy efficiency.The formulated optimization problem is highly non-convex and difficult to be solved directly.Therefore,we decompose the original problem into three sub-problems.We first propose the successive convex approximation(SCA)based method to design the beamforming of the users and the phase shift matrix of IRS,and apply the Lagrange dual method to obtain a closed-form expression of the uploading ratios.For the trajectory optimization,we propose a block coordinate descent(BCD)based method to obtain a local optimal solution.Finally,we propose the alternating optimization(AO)based overall algorithmand analyzed its complexity to be equivalent or lower than existing algorithms.Simulation results show the superiority of the proposedmethod compared with existing schemes in energy efficiency.

Computing Resource Allocation for Blockchain-Based Mobile Edge Computing

Users and edge servers are not fullymutually trusted inmobile edge computing(MEC),and hence blockchain can be introduced to provide trustableMEC.In blockchain-basedMEC,each edge server functions as a node in bothMEC and blockchain,processing users’tasks and then uploading the task related information to the blockchain.That is,each edge server runs both users’offloaded tasks and blockchain tasks simultaneously.Note that there is a trade-off between the resource allocation for MEC and blockchain tasks.Therefore,the allocation of the resources of edge servers to the blockchain and theMEC is crucial for the processing delay of blockchain-based MEC.Most of the existing research tackles the problem of resource allocation in either blockchain or MEC,which leads to unfavorable performance of the blockchain-based MEC system.In this paper,we study how to allocate the computing resources of edge servers to the MEC and blockchain tasks with the aimtominimize the total systemprocessing delay.For the problem,we propose a computing resource Allocation algorithmfor Blockchain-based MEC(ABM)which utilizes the Slater’s condition,Karush-Kuhn-Tucker(KKT)conditions,partial derivatives of the Lagrangian function and subgradient projection method to obtain the solution.Simulation results show that ABM converges and effectively reduces the processing delay of blockchain-based MEC.

Age of Information Based User Scheduling and Data Assignment in Multi-User Mobile Edge Computing Networks:An Online Algorithm

This paper investigates the age of information(AoI)-based multi-user mobile edge computing(MEC)network with partial offloading mode.The weighted sum AoI(WSA)is first analyzed and derived,and then a WSA minimization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing the user scheduling and data assignment.Due to the non-analytic expression of the WSA w.r.t.the optimization variables and the unknowability of future network information,the problem cannot be solved with known solution methods.Therefore,an online Joint Partial Offloading and User Scheduling Optimization(JPOUSO)algorithm is proposed by transforming the original problem into a single-slot data assignment subproblem and a single-slot user scheduling sub-problem and solving the two sub-problems separately.We analyze the computational complexity of the presented JPO-USO algorithm,which is of O(N),with N being the number of users.Simulation results show that the proposed JPO-USO algorithm is able to achieve better AoI performance compared with various baseline methods.It is shown that both the user’s data assignment and the user’s AoI should be jointly taken into account to decrease the system WSA when scheduling users.

Online Computation Offloading and Trajectory Scheduling for UAV-Enabled Wireless Powered Mobile Edge Computing

The unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)-enabled mobile edge computing(MEC) architecture is expected to be a powerful technique to facilitate 5 G and beyond ubiquitous wireless connectivity and diverse vertical applications and services, anytime and anywhere. Wireless power transfer(WPT) is another promising technology to prolong the operation time of low-power wireless devices in the era of Internet of Things(IoT). However, the integration of WPT and UAV-enabled MEC systems is far from being well studied, especially in dynamic environments. In order to tackle this issue, this paper aims to investigate the stochastic computation offloading and trajectory scheduling for the UAV-enabled wireless powered MEC system. A UAV offers both RF wireless power transmission and computation services for IoT devices. Considering the stochastic task arrivals and random channel conditions, a long-term average energyefficiency(EE) minimization problem is formulated.Due to non-convexity and the time domain coupling of the variables in the formulated problem, a lowcomplexity online computation offloading and trajectory scheduling algorithm(OCOTSA) is proposed by exploiting Lyapunov optimization. Simulation results verify that there exists a balance between EE and the service delay, and demonstrate that the system EE performance obtained by the proposed scheme outperforms other benchmark schemes.

Computation Rate Maximization in Multi-User Cooperation-Assisted Wireless-Powered Mobile Edge Computing with OFDMA

In the era of Internet of Things(Io T),mobile edge computing(MEC)and wireless power transfer(WPT)provide a prominent solution for computation-intensive applications to enhance computation capability and achieve sustainable energy supply.A wireless-powered mobile edge computing(WPMEC)system consisting of a hybrid access point(HAP)combined with MEC servers and many users is considered in this paper.In particular,a novel multiuser cooperation scheme based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access(OFDMA)is provided to improve the computation performance,where users can split the computation tasks into various parts for local computing,offloading to corresponding helper,and HAP for remote execution respectively with the aid of helper.Specifically,we aim at maximizing the weighted sum computation rate(WSCR)by optimizing time assignment,computation-task allocation,and transmission power at the same time while keeping energy neutrality in mind.We transform the original non-convex optimization problem to a convex optimization problem and then obtain a semi-closed form expression of the optimal solution by considering the convex optimization techniques.Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed multi-user cooperationassisted WPMEC scheme greatly improves the WSCR of all users than the existing schemes.In addition,OFDMA protocol increases the fairness and decreases delay among the users when compared to TDMA protocol.

Joint Optimization of Task Caching,Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation for Mobile Edge Computing

Applications with sensitive delay and sizeable data volumes,such as interactive gaming and augmented reality,have become popular in recent years.These applications pose a huge challenge for mobile users with limited resources.Computation offloading is a mainstream technique to reduce execution delay and save energy for mobile users.However,computation offloading requires communication between mobile users and mobile edge computing(MEC) servers.Such a mechanism would difficultly meet users’ demand in some data-hungry and computation-intensive applications because the energy consumption and delay caused by transmissions are considerable expenses for users.Caching task data can effectively reduce the data transmissions when users offload their tasks to the MEC server.The limited caching space at the MEC server calls for judiciously decide which tasks should be cached.Motivated by this,we consider the joint optimization of computation offloading and task caching in a cellular network.In particular,it allows users to proactively cache or offload their tasks at the MEC server.The objective of this paper is to minimize the system cost,which is defined as the weighted sum of task execution delay and energy consumption for all users.Aiming at establishing optimal performance bound for the system design,we formulate an optimization problem by jointly optimizing the task caching,computation offloading,and resource allocation.The problem is a challenging mixed-integer non-linear programming problem and is NP-hard in general.To solve it efficiently,by using convex optimization,Karmarkar ’s algorithm and the proposed fast search algorithm,we obtain an optimal solution of the formulated problem with manageable computational complexity.Extensive simulation results show that in comparison to some representative benchmark methods,the proposed solution can effectively reduce the system cost.

Users'experience matter:Delay sensitivity-aware computation offloading in mobile edge computing

As a promising computing paradigm,Mobile Edge Computing(MEC)provides communication and computing capability at the edge of the network to address the concerns of massive computation requirements,constrained battery capacity and limited bandwidth of the Internet of Things(IoT)systems.Most existing works on mobile edge task ignores the delay sensitivities,which may lead to the degraded utility of computation offloading and dissatisfied users.In this paper,we study the delay sensitivity-aware computation offloading by jointly considering both user's tolerance towards delay of task execution and the network status under computation and communication constraints.Specifically,we use a specific multi-user and multi-server MEC system to define the latency sensitivity of task offloading based on the analysis of delay distribution of task categories.Then,we propose a scoring mechanism to evaluate the sensitivity-dependent utility of task execution and devise a Centralized Iterative Redirection Offloading(CIRO)algorithm to collect all information in the MEC system.By starting with an initial offloading strategy,the CIRO algorithm enables IoT devices to cooperate and iteratively redirect task offloading decisions to optimize the offloading strategy until it converges.Extensive simulation results show that our method can significantly improve the utility of computation offloading in MEC systems and has lower time complexity than existing algorithms.

Mobile Edge Computing Towards 5G: Vision, Recent Progress, and Open Challenges

Mobile Edge Computing(MEC) is an emerging technology in 5G era which enables the provision of the cloud and IT services within the close proximity of mobile subscribers.It allows the availability of the cloud servers inside or adjacent to the base station.The endto-end latency perceived by the mobile user is therefore reduced with the MEC platform.The context-aware services are able to be served by the application developers by leveraging the real time radio access network information from MEC.The MEC additionally enables the compute intensive applications execution in the resource constraint devices with the collaborative computing involving the cloud servers.This paper presents the architectural description of the MEC platform as well as the key functionalities enabling the above features.The relevant state-of-the-art research efforts are then surveyed.The paper finally discusses and identifies the open research challenges of MEC.