Optimal Resource Allocation for Wireless Powered Mobile Edge Computing with Dynamic Task Arrivals

This paper considers a wireless powered multiuser mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where a multi-antenna access point (AP) employs the radio-frequency (RF) signal based wireless power transfer (WPT) to charge a number of distributed users, and each user utilizes the harvested energy to execute computation tasks via local computing and task offloading. We consider the frequency division multiple access (FDMA) protocol to support simultaneous task offloading from multiple users to the AP. Different from previous works that considered one-shot optimization with static task models, we study the joint computation and wireless resource allocation optimization with dynamic task arrivals over a finite time horizon consisting of multiple slots. Under this setup, our objective is to minimize the system energy consumption including the AP's transmission energy and the MEC server's computing energy over the whole horizon, by jointly optimizing the transmit energy beamforming at the AP, and the local computing and task offloading strategies at the users over different time slots. To characterize the fundamental performance limit of such systems, we focus on the offline optimization by assuming the task and channel information are known a-priori at the AP. In this case, the energy minimization problem corresponds to a convex optimization problem. Leveraging the Lagrange duality method, we obtain the optimal solution to this problem in a well structure. It is shown that in order to maximize the system energy efficiency, the optimal number of task input-bits at each user and the AP are monotonically increasing over time, and the offloading strategies at different users depend on both the wireless channel conditions and the task load at the AP. Numerical results demonstrate the benefit of the proposed joint-WPT-MEC design over alternative benchmark schemes without such joint design.