Intelligent Offloading Strategy Design for Relaying Mobile Edge Computing Networks

To support the application of IoT and smart city, high data-rate wireless transmission is required. To meet the demand of high data-rate, the techniques of multiple antennas and mobile edge computing (MEC) networks have been proposed in order to enhance the data transmission rate significantly. However, there still exist lots of challenges array signal processing assisted MEC networks. In this paper, we propose an intelligent framework of offloading strategy for MEC networks assisted by array signal processing, where one user with multiple antennas has some computational tasks. These tasks can be computed by the user itself which however has limited computational capability, or computed by the near-by computational access points (CAPs) which has a powerful computational capability at the cost of wireless transmission. We consider the system cost by jointly taking into account the computational price, the energy consumption and the latency. By minimizing the system cost, we propose an intelligent offloading strategy based on ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm, where the ants randomly visit the CAPs in order to obtain the final results. To further enhance the MEC network performance, the array signal processing is utilized at the user, where either the maximum ratio transmission (MRT) or selection combining (SC) is used to assist the data transmission from the user to CAPs. Simulation results with MRT and SC are finally demonstrated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed ACO-based offloading strategy and array signal processing schemes.