Multi-Relay Assisted Computation Offloading for Multi-Access Edge Computing Systems With Energy Harvesting

In multi-access edge computing systems with energy harvesting (MEC-EH), the mobile devices are empowered with unstable energy harvested from renewable energy sources. To prolong the life of mobile devices, as many computation-intensive tasks as possible should be offloaded to the MEC server. However, when the system states of mobile device and MEC server are unstable, e.g. poor communication channel conditions, a great number of tasks will be executed locally, leading to a long execution time. Even worse, some tasks may be dropped due to low energy levels. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a multi-relay assisted computation offloading framework for MEC-EH systems. In this framework, a computation task can be executed by offloading to the MEC server with the help of multiple relay nodes, such as the neighboring nodes. We introduce execution cost as a performance metric to incorporate both the task execution time and task failure. We then develop a low-complexity online algorithm, namely MRACO algorithm, to minimize the average execution cost. MRACO algorithm can select the optimal execution strategy for each task from (1) executing the task locally, (2) offloading it to the MEC server directly, (3) offloading it to the MEC server with the help of the most suitable neighboring nodes, and (4) simply dropping it. Moreover, we also develop an algorithm for selecting the suitable neighboring devices to act as relays and determining the optimal task splitting ratio between them. Finally, performance evaluation shows that the proposed MRACO algorithm greatly outperforms the benchmarks in terms of both average execution time and task drop rate.