Energy Efficiency and Delay Tradeoff in an MEC-Enabled Mobile IoT Network

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged as a promising technology in the 5G era. It is deemed an effective paradigm to support computation intensive and delay-critical applications even at energy-constrained and computation-limited Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To effectively exploit the performance benefits enabled by MEC, it is imperative to jointly allocate radio and computational resources by considering nonstationary computation demands, user mobility, and wireless fading channels. This article aims to study the tradeoff between energy efficiency (EE) and service delay for multiuser multiserver MEC-enabled IoT systems when provisioning offloading services in a user mobility scenario. Particularly, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem with the objective of minimizing the long-term average network EE with the constraints of the task queue stability, peak transmit power, maximum CPU-cycle frequency, and maximum user number. To tackle the problem, we propose an online offloading and resource allocation algorithm by transforming the original problem into several individual subproblems in each time slot based on the Lyapunov optimization theory, which are then solved by convex decomposition and submodular methods. Theoretical analysis proves that the proposed algorithm can achieve a $[O(1/V), O(V)]$ tradeoff between EE and service delay. Simulation results verify the theoretical analysis and demonstrate our proposed algorithm can offer much better EE-delay performance in task offloading challenges, compared to several baselines.