Resource Provision for Energy-Efficient Mobile Edge Computing Systems

Abstract

Mobile Edge Computing (a.k.a Fog computing) is recently proposed to provide computing service for delay-sensitive mobile applications. Despite various benefits, deploying edge servers in cellular networks would increase their energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate the provision of resources, including both communication and computation resources, of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) systems to improve their energy efficiency (EE). In a MEC system, both the communication subsystem, which allows mobile users to access Internet and offload their computing tasks, and the computation subsystem, which accomplishes the offloaded computing tasks, affect the service latency and consume energy. Modelling the whole system as tandem queues, we study the trade-offs between these two subsystems on energy consumption and service latency. Based on the analysis results, we propose an algorithm to determine the optimal provision of both communication and computation resources to minimize the overall energy consumption without sacrificing the performance on service latency. Numerical results are provided to validate our analytical findings.