Energy Minimization for Wireless Powered Data Offloading in IRS-assisted MEC for Vehicular Networks

In this paper, we consider an IRS-assisted and wireless-powered mobile edge computing (MEC) system that allows both edge users and the IRS to harvest energy from the hybrid access point (HAP), co-located with the MEC server. Each edge user uses the harvested energy to offload its data to the MEC server. The IRS not only assists downlink energy transfer to the edge users, but also improves the users' uplink offloading rates. To minimize the overall energy consumption, we jointly optimize the users' offloading decisions, the HAP's active beamforming, as well as the IRS's energy harvesting and passive beamforming strategies. The energy minimization problem is intractable due to complicated couplings in both the objective function and constraints. We decompose this problem into the downlink energy transfer and the uplink data offloading phases. The uplink phase can be efficiently optimized by the conventional semi-definite relaxation (SDR) method, while the downlink phase depends on the alternating optimization between the users' offloading decisions and the joint active and passive beamforming strategies. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed offloading scheme can significantly reduce the HAP's energy consumption compared with typical benchmarks.