Socially-Motivated Cooperative Mobile Edge Computing

In this article we propose a novel paradigm of socially-motivated cooperative mobile edge computing, where the social tie structure among mobile and wearable device users is leveraged for achieving effective and trustworthy cooperation for collaborative computation task executions. We envision that a combination of local device computation and networked resource sharing empowers the devices with multiple flexible task execution approaches, including local mobile execution, D2D offloaded execution, direct cloud offloaded execution, and D2D-assisted cloud offloaded execution. Specifically, we propose a system model for cooperative mobile edge computing where a device social graph model is developed to capture the social relationship among the devices. We then devise a socially- aware bipartite matching based cooperative task offloading algorithm by integrating the social tie structure into the device computation and network resource sharing process. We evaluate the performance of socially-motivated cooperative mobile edge computing using both Erdos-Renyi and real-trace based social graphs, which corroborates the superior performance of the proposed socially-aware mechanism.