Joint Task Assignment and Resource Allocation in the Heterogeneous Multi-Layer Mobile Edge Computing Networks

Driven by great demands on low-latency services of the edge devices (EDs), mobile edge computing (MEC) has been proposed to enable the computing capacities at the edge of the radio access network. However, conventional MEC servers suffer some disadvantages of limited computing capacity, preventing computation-intensive tasks to be processed on time. To relief this issue, we propose a heterogeneous multi-layer MEC (HetMEC) network where data that cannot be timely processed at the edge are allowed to be offloaded to the upper-layer MEC servers, and finally to the cloud center (CC) with more powerful computing capacity. We design the latency minimization algorithm by jointly coordinating the task assignment, computing and transmission resources among the EDs, multi-layer MEC servers, and the CC. Simulation results indicate that our proposed algorithm can achieve a lower latency and stronger robustness than the conventional MEC schemes.