Energy-Efficient Online Resource Management and Allocation Optimization in Multi-User Multi-Task Mobile-Edge Computing Systems with Hybrid Energy Harvesting

Sensors (Basel). 2018 Sep 17;18(9):3140. doi: 10.3390/s18093140.

Abstract

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has evolved into a promising technology that can relieve computing pressure on wireless devices (WDs) in the Internet of Things (IoT) by offloading computation tasks to the MEC server. Resource management and allocation are challenging because of the unpredictability of task arrival, wireless channel status and energy consumption. To address such a challenge, in this paper, we provide an energy-efficient joint resource management and allocation (ECM-RMA) policy to reduce time-averaged energy consumption in a multi-user multi-task MEC system with hybrid energy harvested WDs. We first formulate the time-averaged energy consumption minimization problem while the MEC system satisfied both the data queue stability constraint and energy queue stability constraint. To solve the stochastic optimization problem, we turn the problem into two deterministic sub-problems, which can be easily solved by convex optimization technique and linear programming technique. Correspondingly, we propose the ECM-RMA algorithm that does not require priori knowledge of stochastic processes such as channel states, data arrivals and green energy harvesting. Most importantly, the proposed algorithm achieves the energy consumption-delay trade-off as [ O ( 1 / V ) , O ( V ) ] . V, as a non-negative weight, which can effectively control the energy consumption-delay performance. Finally, simulation results verify the correctness of the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: Internet of Things; Lyapunov optimization; delay; energy efficiency; hybrid energy harvesting; mobile edge computing.