Collaborative Computation Offloading for Mobile-Edge Computing over Fiber-Wireless Networks

In order to address the conflict between resource- hungry mobile applications and resource-constrained mobile devices (MDs), mobile-edge computing (MEC), which offers cloud computing capabilities at the edge of networks in close proximity to the MDs, is envisioned to be a promising approach. However, existing mobile-edge computation offloading studies only took the resource allocation between the MDs and MEC servers into consideration, and ignored the resource allocation between MEC and centralized cloud computing servers. Moreover, current MEC Hosted Networks mostly adopt the networking technology integrating cellular and core networks, which has the shortcomings of single networking mode, high congestion, high latency and energy consumption. Toward this end, we provide in this paper an architecture of centralized cloud and distributed MEC over hybrid fiber-wireless network, which has the features of supporting diverse network techniques, easy expansibility, high capacity and reliability, low latency and energy consumption. The problem of cloud-MEC collaborative computation offloading is studied and an approximation collaborative computation offloading scheme is proposed as our solution. Numerical results corroborate the energy efficiency of our proposed collaborative scheme.