Minimum Energy Resource Allocation in FOG Radio Access Network with Fronthaul and Latency Constraints

The fog radio access network has been proposed as a heterogeneous cloud computing system which allows mobile devices to offload computationally intensive tasks to the remote cloud and nearby edge node. In this paper, by taking into account latency and fronthaul constraints, we formulate a computation and communication resource allocation problem for optimally offloading the computation tasks to the remote cloud and the edge node while minimizing the computation and computation energy of the edge node. Due to the binary variables for remote cloud/edge node assignment and complex communication and computation resource constraints, the formulated design problem is challenging to solve. We show that the problem can actually be recast as a convex problem as long as the binary variables are given. Based on this result, we propose a heuristic iterative algorithm for solving the minimum energy resource allocation problem efficiently. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs much better than simply offloading all the tasks into the edge node or the remote cloud.