Wireless Powered Mobile Edge Computing for Industrial Internet of Things Systems

The convergence of wireless power transfer (WPT) and mobile edge computing (MEC) has fostered the rise of wireless powered MEC, which is taken as a crucial technology for the sustainability of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems. This article provides an overview of wireless powered MEC enabled IIoT systems, including use cases, network requirements, system architecture, and resource management. First, we highlight four key requirements to drive operational efficiency from the perspective of being transformed IIoT projects. Then an integration architecture of wireless powered MEC for IIoT is proposed. Designed with joint consideration of energy, communication, and computing resources, the architecture is enabled by an efficient system schedule mechanism to achieve age-aware data update, green and sustainable energy supply, as well as hierarchical and resilient computation. Finally, a case study is provided to verify the feasibility of the proposed architecture and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed resource management approach.