Energy-efficient cooperative offloading for mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve the energy efficiency for latency-constraint computation. This paper proposes a novel user cooperation approach in both computation and communication for MEC, based on the three-node cooperative offloading architecture, which consists of two mobile users and a computing access point (CAP). The mobile application tasks can be executed locally or be offloaded to either a cooperative mobile user or CAP for remote execution. The cooperative task offloading problem is investigated to minimize the energy consumption of mobile users while satisfying the execution delay. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming, and the NP-hardness is provided by reducing it to a 0-1 knapsack problem. This paper also provides an optimal algorithm based on dynamic programming and an efficient heuristic approach. Numerical results show that the cooperative offloading scheme outperforms the local computing method by 66.4% on the energy consumption of mobile nodes. Furthermore, the proposed heuristic algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance under different network settings.