Joint Terminal Pairing and Multi-Dimensional Resource Allocation for Cooperative Computation in a WP-MEC System

The combination of multi-access edge computing (MEC) and wireless power transfer (WPT) can potentially improve system performance and prolong terminals’ battery lifetime. In this paper, we study cooperative computation in a wireless powered multi-access edge computing (WP-MEC) system. In this system, there are an access point (AP) deployed with an MEC server and multiple cellular terminals that are powered by harvested energy from a power station. The computational task of each terminal is partially completed locally and partially offloaded to the AP and an nearby idle terminal. In order to minimize energy consumption in the system, we jointly optimize terminal pairing and multi-dimensional resource (i.e., computing power and communication resource) allocation. A non-convex mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem is formulated in this paper. To solve this challenging problem, we propose a bilevel optimization approach, in which the multi-dimensional resource allocation scheme is designed under given terminal pairing relationships in the inner level, and then the pairing relationships between terminals are obtained in the outer level based on the obtained multi-dimensional resource allocation scheme. Extensive numerical results show that the proposed bilevel optimization scheme can reduce energy consumption considerably compared to some baseline schemes.