Energy-latency tradeoff for energy-aware offloading in mobile edge computing networks

Mobile edge computing (MEC) brings computation capacity to the edge of mobile networks in close proximity to smart mobile devices (SMDs) and contributes to energy saving compared with local computing, but resulting in increased network load and transmission latency. To investigate the tradeoff between energy consumption and latency, we present an energy-aware offloading scheme, which jointly optimizes communication and computation resource allocation under the limited energy and sensitive latency. In this paper, single and multicell MEC network scenarios are considered at the same time. The residual energy of smart devices’ battery is introduced into the definition of the weighting factor of energy consumption and latency. In terms of the mixed integer nonlinear problem for computation offloading and resource allocation, we propose an iterative search algorithm combining interior penalty function with D.C. (the difference of two convex functions/sets) programming to find the optimal solution. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain lower total cost (i.e., the weighted sum of energy consumption and execution latency) comparing with the baseline algorithms, and the energy-aware weighting factor is of great significance to maintain the lifetime of SMDs.