Cooperative Computation Offloading in FiWi Enhanced 4G HetNets Using Self-Organizing MEC

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm to meet the rapidly growing computation demands of mobile applications. This paper investigates the performance gains of cooperative computation offloading for MEC enabled FiWi enhanced HetNets with capacity-limited backhaul links. After presenting the envisioned two-tier MEC architecture for a FiWi based networking infrastructure, we propose a simple but efficient offloading strategy, which relies on the flexible trilateral cooperation between end-device, edge servers, and the remote cloud. We then present an analytical framework to estimate the average response time and energy consumption of mobile users for various offloading scenarios with different wireless access modes (i.e., WiFi and 4G LTE-A). The presented analysis flexibly allows for incorporating both offloaded and conventional human-to-human (H2H) traffic of mobile users as well as fixed (wired) subscribers. Finally, we present our self-organization based mechanism, which enables mobile users to make suitable energy-delay trade-offs by jointly minimizing the average task execution time and energy consumption, using only their local information. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed cooperative self-organizing offloading strategy and its superior performance over schemes with MEC- or cloud-only offloading strategies.