Cooperative MEC With Non-Uniform User Density: Resource Planning and State Control Optimization

Mobile edge computing (MEC) allows mobile devices to offload computationally intensive tasks to nearby base stations equipped with computational resources. MEC also provides a solution for supporting low latency responses. However, MEC increases the system power consumption by adding extra computational units. It is important to carefully plan computational resources to achieve a balance between quality of service (QoS) and power consumption. Moreover, the MEC system control should shut down unused resources when traffic rates fall to further decrease the power consumption. In this letter, we investigate a workload-based core power state control for cooperative MEC systems and a heterogeneous resource planning method. We also formulate a joint resource planning and workload-threshold optimization problem for power consumption minimization. The problem is solved using a hybrid method using metaheuristic and heuristic algorithms. The problem is first solved for an equivalent uniform system using integer gaining and sharing knowledge (IGSK). The resources are then redistributed over the base stations using a heuristic that considers the effect of power state control on core distribution. The results show that the iterative algorithm can accomplish a satisfactory QoS with the same number of resources obtained by other approaches or less. Additionally, threshold control reduced the system power consumption by 19.6%. © 1997-2012 IEEE.