Mixed-Timescale Joint Computational Offloading and Wireless Resource Allocation Strategy in Energy Harvesting Multi-MEC Server Systems

Abstract

As an emerging paradigm enabling mobile devices to leverage additional computation resources from nearby MEC servers (MSs), mobile edge computing (MEC) has drawn great attention from academia to industry. Unlike the conventional cloud server, the MEC provides a medium-scale and portable computation ability at MSs without relying on the time-consuming and capacity-constrained backhaul. However, the MEC offloading process is still highly sensitive to the fluctuation of both radio and computing resources. In this paper, considering the independent variation of the wireless channel conditions and computing tasks, we propose a Mixed-timescale Joint Computational offloading and Wireless resource allocation (MJCW) algorithm for latency-critical applications, aiming at minimizing the total energy consumption. Through such a new approach, the original NP-hard problem is decoupled into a short-term stage problem seeking for the allocation of physical power and subcarrier and a long-term stage problem of task offloading and frequency scaling. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves excellent performance in energy saving in comparison with conventional schemes and realizes higher utilization of green energy by adjusting the energy price of MSs.