Energy Efficient User Access and Computation Offloading Strategy for Fog Radio Access Network with Uplink/Downlink Decoupling

Fog radio access networks (F-RANs) are regarded as a promising solution for the future wireless networks by incorporating the concept of fog computing into the architecture of wireless access networks. F-RANs make full use of the computing and storage capabilities of edge network devices, and can effectively alleviate the overhead of backhaul links and reduce the processing delay of the tasks. However, existing researches were mostly focused on the coupled uplink and downlink scenario which will lead to insufficient utilization of resources and high energy consumption. In order to solve above problems, we introduce the decoupled the uplink and downlink (DUDA) access mode to F-RANs and jointly optimize the user access and computation offloading decisions with the aim of energy consumption minimization. To reduce the computational complexity, we further utilize the reinforcement learning algorithm to solve this complex combinatorial optimization problem. The simulation results show that compared with other schemes, the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the energy consumption performance while meeting user demands.