Green Machine-to-Machine Communication with Mobile Edge Computing and Wireless Network Virtualization

With the explosive growth of machine-type communication devices (MTCDs), both academia and industry are paying more attention to M2M communications. In this article, we introduce mobile edge computing into virtualized cellular networks with M2M communications to decrease energy consumption and optimize computing resource allocation. Moreover, based on different functions and QoS requirements, the physical network can be virtualized into several virtual networks; then each MTCD selects the corresponding virtual network to access through the embedded subscriber identity module (eSIM) technology. Meanwhile, the random access process of MTCDs is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process to minimize the system cost, which consists of both energy consumption and execution lime of computing tasks. Furthermore, to facilitate the network architecture integration, software-defined networking is introduced to deal with the diverse protocols and standards in M2M networks. Extensive simulation results with different system parameters reveal that the proposed scheme could significantly improve the system performance compared to the existing schemes.