Task-Decoding Assisted Cooperative Transmission for Coded Edge Computing

Distributed edge computing has been advocated as a key enabling technology to tackle large-scale intelligence applications, which is however hampered by the straggling effect. To overcome straggling, coded edge computing emerges as a promising solution by creating judiciously designed redundant computations using coding theory. Nonetheless, existing transmission schemes for coded edge computing that make edge nodes (ENs) transmit independently are often sub-optimal, as the computation results are correlated due to coding redundancy. This entails a pressing need for more effective transmission for coded edge computing. With this consideration, a novel task-decoding assisted cooperative transmission scheme is proposed in this work to facilitate cooperative transmission in general coded edge computing settings. Specifically, by exploiting the structural relation among the encoded sub-tasks, a task-decoding mechanism is developed to enable ENs to reconstruct computation results of all other ENs, so that they can cooperatively transmit with any other EN by forming a virtual multi-antenna system. To characterize the delay performance of the proposed scheme, an analytic bound with closed-form expression is derived first, followed by a more accurate algorithmic bound for scenarios with a relatively small recovery threshold. Simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.