Joint Computation and Communication Cooperation for Mobile Edge Computing

This paper proposes a novel joint computation and communication cooperation approach in mobile edge computing (MEC) systems, which enables user cooperation in both computation and communication for improving the MEC performance. In particular, we consider a basic three-node MEC system that consists of a user node, a helper node, and an access point (AP) node attached with an MEC server. We focus on the user's latency-constrained computation over a finite block, and develop a four-slot protocol for implementing the joint computation and communication cooperation. Under this setup, we jointly optimize the computation and communication resource allocation at both the user and the helper, so as to minimize their total energy consumption subject to the user's computation latency constraint. We provide the optimal solution to this problem. Numerical results show that the proposed joint cooperation approach significantly improves the computation capacity and the energy efficiency at the user and helper nodes, as compared to other benchmark schemes without such a joint design.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Latency Analysis of Coded Computation Schemes over Wireless Networks

Large-scale distributed computing systems face two major bottlenecks that limit their scalability: straggler delay caused by the variability of computation times at different worker nodes and communication bottlenecks caused by shuffling data across many nodes in the network. Recently, it has been shown that codes can provide significant gains in overcoming these bottlenecks. In particular, optimal coding schemes for minimizing latency in distributed computation of linear functions and mitigating the effect of stragglers was proposed for a wired network, where the workers can simultaneously transmit messages to a master node without interference. In this paper, we focus on the problem of coded computation over a wireless master-worker setup with straggling workers, where only one worker can transmit the result of its local computation back to the master at a time. We consider 3 asymptotic regimes (determined by how the communication and computation times are scaled with the number of workers) and precisely characterize the total run-time of the distributed algorithm and optimum coding strategy in each regime. In particular, for the regime of practical interest where the computation and communication times of the distributed computing algorithm are comparable, we show that the total run-time approaches a simple lower bound that decouples computation and communication, and demonstrate that coded schemes are $\Theta(\log(n))$ times faster than uncoded schemes