Joint user association, service caching, and task offloading in multi-tier communication/multi-tier edge computing heterogeneous networks

Due to the wide range of intensive computational applications and ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigms, it has become crucial to develop a new platform that can achieve low delay, high network throughput, and enhanced quality of service (QoS). This paper proposes a joint user association, service caching, and task offloading strategy to reduce delay and enhance users’ QoS in multi-tier communication and multi-tier edge computing heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The considered system model consists of multi-users with different tasks and service data sizes communicating in a heterogeneous network of one massive multiple-input multiple-output (M-MIMO) macro base station and some small base stations. The proposed work investigates user association, power allocation, optimum service data caching, and task offloading strategies at the computing network edges. Thereby, the objectives of this work are to propose an efficient framework to reduce the system delay, increase the network throughput, and meet the user requirements in multi-tier communication and multi-tier edge computing heterogeneous networks. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art with a 49.48% decrease in system delay, 80% reduction in cost and hardware complexity in terms of the reduced number of installed antennas, and 48.58% enhancement in the network throughput.