Joint Communication, Computation, Caching, and Control in Big Data Multi-Access Edge Computing

The concept of Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has been recently introduced to supplement cloud computing by deploying MEC servers to the network edge so as to reduce the network delay and alleviate the load on cloud data centers. However, compared to the resourceful cloud, MEC server has limited resources. When each MEC server operates independently, it cannot handle all computational and big data demands stemming from users devices. Consequently, the MEC server cannot provide significant gains in overhead reduction of data exchange between users devices and remote cloud. Therefore, joint Computing, Caching, Communication, and Control (4C) at the edge with MEC server collaboration is needed. To address these challenges, in this paper, the problem of joint 4C in big data MEC is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to jointly optimize a linear combination of the bandwidth consumption and network latency. However, the formulated problem is shown to be non-convex. As a result, a proximal upper bound problem of the original formulated problem is proposed. To solve the proximal upper bound problem, the block successive upper bound minimization method is applied. Simulation results show that the proposed approach satisfies computation deadlines and minimizes bandwidth consumption and network latency.