Architectures for coded mobile edge computing

We consider a mobile edge computing scenario, in which mobile users (e.g., smartphones) offload their computation requests to the computing nodes distributed at the network edge (e.g., base stations). The edge nodes process the offloaded requests in the “computation phase”, and return the results to the users in the “communication phase” through wireless links. With emphasis on the role of coding in both computation and communication phases, we introduce new architectures for mobile edge computing to exploit the best of both and achieve three salient features: 1) Optimality: We show that coded computations can induce collaboration among the nodes in communication phase, and thus achieves minimum possible load of communication, without requiring extra computation, therefore achieves the minimum possible load of computation simultaneously. 2) Universality: The code design in the coded computation does not require channel state information in communication phase, and therefore it is universality optimum for any channel coefficient. 3) Mobility tolerance: The computation results can be delivered from any subset of the edge nodes with slightly more computations, thus mobility of the users can be dealt with effectively.