Computation Offloading Based on Cooperations of Mobile Edge Computing-Enabled Base Stations

Mobile edge computing (MEC) can augment the computation capabilities of mobile terminals (MTs) through offloading the computational tasks from the MTs to the MEC-enabled base station (MEC-BS) covering them. However, the load of MEC-BS will rise as the increase of the scale of tasks. Existing schemes try to alleviate the load of MEC-BS through refusing, postponing, or queuing the offloading requests of the MTs; thus, the users' QoS will largely deteriorate due to service interruption and prolonged waiting and execution time. In this paper, we investigate the cooperations of multiple MEC-BSs and propose a novel scheme to enhance the computation offloading service of an MEC-BS through further offloading the extra tasks to other MEC-BSs connected to it. An optimization algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve the optimization problem which maximizes the total benefits of time and energy consumptions gained by all the MTs covered by the MEC-BS. A balance factor is used to flexibly adjust the bias of optimization between minimizations of time and energy consumption. Extensive simulations are carried out in eight different scenarios, and the results demonstrate that our scheme can largely enhance the system performance, and it outperforms the reference scheme in all scenarios.