Edge Cache-Aided Computation Offloading for Mobile Cloud Computing

Abstract

Although mobile cloud computing can provide flexible services to computation-intensive applications, its wide network span makes low latency a thorny problem. By deploying cloud resources on the edge of the network, mobile edge computing has an inherent advantage in providing quality of services due to the proximity to mobile devices. However, the capability of computing resources deployed on edge servers is usually much less than that of the remote cloud servers. Current researches mainly investigate how to accommodate computation offloading tasks with optimal caching and/or offloading strategies, which overlook the interplay between computing and caching. Therefore, this paper focuses on the effect of caching on alleviating the pressure of computing resources and attempts to reveal how caching can play a role in reducing computing resources usage. It is worth noting that by caching computation output data on the edge and mobile devices, contention for computing resources can be avoid during peak times. A joint computing and bandwidth resource allocation problem with power constraints is formulated to minimize the weighted sum of energy consumption and computing resource usage. A successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm is adopted and simulation results proves the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in saving computing resources.