Dynamic Offloading for Energy Harvesting Mobile Edge Computing: Architecture, Case Studies, and Future Directions

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is envisioned as a new paradigm by integrating the mobile computing functionality into 5G wireless networks, aiming at empowering communication networks with low-latency services. In general, mobile devices have finite battery lifetime (e.g., machine-type devices) and the energy harvesting is advocated to provide perpetual energy supply for achieving sustainable operation, which is very important for facilitating sustainable computing in future applications. In this paper, we propose a wireless powered MEC network architecture that employs device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaying heterogeneous networks (HetNets) to enable the computational tasks offloading to resource-rich edge servers. A dynamic offloading decision is made to execute the computation tasks. Then, we focus on the energy-efficient offloading scheme, and joint offloading and user association scheme. From the illustrative results, we provide insights for the design of this new network architecture. Furthermore, several open research topics are discussed.