Freshness-Aware Information Update and Computation Offloading in Mobile-Edge Computing

Mobile-edge computing is a promising computing paradigm with the advantages of reduced delay and relieved outsourcing traffic to the core network. In mobile-edge computing, reducing the computation offloading cost of mobile users and maintaining fresh information at edge nodes are two critical while conflicted objectives, as both consume the limited wireless bandwidth of edge nodes. Although extensive efforts have been devoted to optimizing computation offloading decisions and some works have investigated freshness-aware channel allocation issues recently, no prior works have considered the above conflict. This article is the first work to jointly optimize the channel allocation and computation offloading decisions, aiming at reducing the computation offloading cost within freshness requirements of sensors. We analyze the recursiveness of Age of Information (AoI) in analogy to the evolvement of a queue and formulate the problem as a nonlinear integer dynamic optimization problem. To overcome the challenges of AoI-computation cost tradeoff, AoI time dependency and high complexity caused by the heterogeneity of users, we propose an algorithm to solve the problem with reduced computation complexity. Specifically, we first transform the original problem into a static optimization problem in each time slot (which is NP-hard) based on Lyapunov optimization techniques. To reduce the computation complexity, we exploit the finite improvement property of potential games and further enforce centralized control to reduce the number of improvement iterations. Simulations have been conducted and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm shows good effectiveness and scalability.