Average Reliability-Optimal Offloading for Mobile Edge Computing in Low-Latency Industrial IoT Networks

In this paper, we consider a multi-access mobile edge computing (MEC) network with multiple sensors and one MEC server in industrial Internet of Things networks, where the MEC server provides a joint computation service (in the computation phase) for a set of sub-tasks offloaded by different sensors (in the communication phase). Due to the requirements of low latency and ultra reliability, we utilize finite blocklength information theory to characterize the reliability of the communication phase and exploit extreme value theory to investigate the delay violation probability in the computation phase. Following these characterizations, we derive the average end-to-end error probability of the entire service and provide two average end-to-end reliability-optimal design frameworks considering fixed frames structure and dynamic frames structure, in both of which the goal is to minimize the average end-to-end error probability by optimally allocating the total time length to each frame, as well as allocating each frame length to the communication phase and the computation phase. For the fixed frames structure, the original problem is decomposed, and the joint convexity of the decomposed sub-problems is rigorously proved, and the optimal solutions are obtained by the proposed optimal time allocation algorithm. Moreover, for the dynamic frames structure, we reformulate the optimization problem by introducing an average time constraint. By exploiting Lagrange multipliers, we transform the reformulated optimization problem into a dual problem with strong duality, the solutions of which can be obtained by the proposed time allocation algorithm. Via simulations, we validate the proven convexity and the approximation in our analytical model and evaluate the performance for both fixed frames length structure and dynamic frames length structure.