On Joint Cooperative Relaying, Resource Allocation, and Scheduling for Mobile Edge Computing Networks

In this paper, we consider Internet of Things (IoT) based mobile edge computing (MEC) system. IoT devices are controlled by access points (APs), which do not have access to any licensed spectrum. This puts limitations on IoT devices’ offloading capability and hence effectively reduces the number of computed bits. Under such scenario, we consider spectrum sharing, where IoT networks get access to licensed spectrum by helping a primary network (owns licensed spectrum) in cooperative relaying. We aim to maximize sum of the primary network’s communication rate and IoT networks’ total number of computed bits by jointly optimizing relay selection, licensed spectrum allocation, local computation, and offloading sequence selection. Moreover, we consider important constraints, e.g., the guaranteed rate for the primary network, IoT devices’ available energy, and available licensed spectrum resource blocks (RBs). We observe that the optimization problem is combinatoric in nature, which becomes more complicated when IoT devices’ scheduling order comes into the formulation. From our analysis, we devise an optimal and computationally efficient algorithm. In the result section, we compare with relevant benchmark systems and show the efficacy of our proposed model. Moreover, we also show how IoT and primary networks benefit from spectrum sharing.