Energy-Efficient Multiuser Partial Computation Offloading With Collaboration of Terminals, Radio Access Network, and Edge Server

Mobile-Edge Computing (MEC) could relieve computing pressure and save energy of resource-constrained Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs) via computation offloading. Nevertheless, offloading strategy design for multiuser MEC systems is challenging. Specifically, offloading operations (i.e., terminal execution strategy, access rate, and cloud execution strategy) are not only inner-coupled for each SMD due to parallel local and cloud execution, but also inter-coupled among SMDs due to competition for radio and computation resources. Worse still, the inner- and inter-coupling interplay each other. However, existing works generally weaken this inner-inter-coupling, resulting in an inability to adapt to network differences, terminal capacity differences, and application requirements differences. Hence, only suboptimal performance could be achieved. As motivated, we jointly optimizes terminal execution strategy, radio resource allocation, and MEC computation resource allocation to minimize weighted sum of terminal energy consumption. Additionally, via dynamically matching individual offloading behavior and group's competitive resources allocation, our proposed algorithm could not only reflect mechanism of interaction between inner- and inter-coupling relationship, but also well adopt to diversities of network conditions, terminal capacity, and application requirements to further harvest MEC gain. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing schemes, more specifically up to 73.8% less energy consumption.