When the User-Centric Network Meets Mobile Edge Computing: Challenges and Optimization

Abstract

In the traditional mobile edge computing (MEC) system, the availability of MEC services is greatly limited for the edge users of the cell due to serious signal attenuation and inter-cell interference. User-centric MEC (UC-MEC) can be seen as a promising solution to address this issue. In UC-MEC, each user is served by a dedicated access point (AP) cluster enabled with MEC capability instead of a single MEC server, however, at the expense of more energy consumption and greater privacy risks. To achieve efficient and reliable resource utilization with user-centric services, we propose an energy efficient blockchainenabled UC-MEC system where blockchain operations and resource optimization are jointly performed. Firstly, we design a resource-aware, reliable, replicated, redundant, and faulttolerant (R-RAFT) consensus mechanism to implement secure and reliable resource trading. Then, an optimization framework based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed to minimize the total energy consumed by wireless transmission, consensus and task computing, where APs clustering, computing resource allocation and bandwidth allocation are jointly considered. Simulation results show superiority of the proposed UC-MEC system over reference schemes, at most 33.96% reduction in the total delay and 48.77% reduction in the total energy consumption.

Reliability-Constrained Task Scheduling for DAG Applications in Mobile Edge Computing

“…With the advent of the internet of everything, autonomous driving, immersive games based on VR or AR technology, and the industrial internet of things (IoT) are emerging [1]. However, achieving these computation-intensive and latencysensitive applications poses a significant challenge for user equipment (UE) that is limited in terms of computation power and battery capacity [2,3]. To solve this problem, mobile edge computing (MEC) is proposed as a new and popular computing paradigm.…”