Secrecy-Based Delay-Aware Computation Offloading via Mobile Edge Computing for Internet of Things

Mobile edge computing (MEC), which enables smart terminals to actively offload computation workloads to computational servers deployed at the edge of networks, has provided an efficient approach to address the intensive computation requirement in mobile Internet applications. In this paper, we investigate the delay-aware computation offloading via MEC for Internet of Things (IoT) with secrecy provisioning. Specifically, we consider a scenario where a malicious eavesdropper intentionally overhears the IoT devices’ offloaded computational data. Taking into account the secrecy outage due to the eavesdropper’s overhearing, we formulate a joint optimization of the secrecy-provisioning, computation offloading, and radio resource allocation (including time and power allocations), with the objective of minimizing the overall delay in finishing the computation requirement of the IoT device. Despite the nonconvexity of the joint optimization problem, we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal computation offloading solution. By exploiting the optimal offloading decision of each IoT device, we further consider the scenario of a group of IoT devices offloading computation workloads to the edge server, and investigate how the edge server optimally selects the devices for providing the computation offloading service while subject to the limited energy budget and the time-slot budget of the edge server. We propose an efficient algorithm to find the optimal selection of the devices. We present extensive numerical results to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and show the impact of the secrecy requirement.