Online Resource Allocation for Semantic-Aware Edge Computing Systems

Mobile edge computing (MEC) in the next generation networks will provide computation services at the network edge to enrich the capabilities of mobile devices and lengthen their battery lives. However, the performance of MEC cannot be guaranteed, when large size local tasks are uploaded to the server simultaneously causing network congestion. As a new paradigm that focuses on transmitting the meaning of messages, semantic communications reveals the significant potential to reduce the network traffic. In this article, we propose a semantic-aware joint communication and computation resource allocation framework for MEC systems. In the considered system, random tasks arrive at each terminal device (TD), which needs to be computed locally or offloaded to the MEC server. To further release the transmission burden, each TD sends the small-size extracted semantic information of tasks to the server instead of the original large-size raw data. An optimization problem of joint semantic-aware division factor, communication and computation resource management is formulated. The problem aims to minimize the energy consumption of the whole system, while satisfying long-term delay and processing rate constraints. To solve this problem, an online low-complexity algorithm is proposed. In particular, Lyapunov optimization is utilized to decompose the original coupled long-term problem into a series of decoupled deterministic problems without requiring the realizations of future task arrivals and channel gains. Then, the block coordinate descent method and successive convex approximation algorithm are adopted to solve the current time slot deterministic problem by observing the current system states. Moreover, the closed-form optimal solution of each optimization variable is provided. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm yields up to 41.8% energy reduction compared to its counterpart without semantic-aware allocation.