A Computation-Communication Tradeoff Study For Mobile Edge Computing Networks

In this paper, we exploit computation replication to reduce the communication time for task offloading in mobile edge computing networks, by introducing a tradeoff between computation load and communication latency defined as a pair of the Normalized Uploading Time (NUlT) and Normalized Downloading Time (NDlT). The key idea of replication is to allow mobile users to offload their tasks to multiple edge nodes for repetitive execution so as to enable the transmission cooperation in computed results downloading, and consequently interference mitigation across users. We develop an achievable communication latency pair at a given computation load, where the NUlT is optimal and the NDlT is within a multiplicative gap of 2 to an information theoretic lower bound. We show that in a certain interval, the NDlT can be traded by the computation load in an inversely proportional function.