Joint Offloading Policy and Resource Allocation in IRS-aided MEC for IoT Users with Short Packet Transmission

This paper focuses on leveraging a mobile edge computing (MEC) server at an access point (AP) to address the delay and reliability sensitivity requirement of multi-user machine-type communication (MTC). By offloading tasks to the MEC server, latency for low-power MTC devices can be minimized. Meanwhile, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are supported to facilitate robust offloading, enhance spectrum efficiency, and improve coverage by influencing incident radio-frequency wave propagation via modifying the phase shifts with passive reflecting components. Therefore, we investigate joint radio resource allocation and edge offloading decision optimization in a multi-user IRS-assisted MEC network, wherein a multi-antenna AP receives information symbols from a set of Internet of Things (IoT) users with short packet transmission. In particular, we minimize the system’s power utilization subject to offloading MTC-enabled IoT users’ quality of service (QoS) requirements, transmit power feasibility, capacity limitation, and IRS phase shift. The non-convex nature of the formulated problem poses a challenge to solving it effectively. To address this, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm based on successive convex approximation (SCA) and a penalty-based approach for handling unit-modulus constraints in the presence of passive reflecting elements at the IRS. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm compared to other baseline schemes.