Augmenting Backpressure Scheduling and Routing for Wireless Computing Networks

Driven by the ever-increasing computing capabilities of mobile devices, the next-generation wireless networks are evolving toward a distributed networking and computing platform, which enables in-network computing and unified resource/service provisioning. The evolution leads to a growing research interest in wireless computing networks that operate under both the high dynamics of the wireless environment and the resource heterogeneity, which complicates resource allocation, scheduling among network flows, and overall optimization. In this paper, we aim to study a low-complexity efficient solution to jointly allocate both networking resources (e.g., links to forward packets between connected computing nodes) and computing resources (e.g., computing power at each node for packet processing). We formulate a novel network utility maximization problem under computing and networking resource constraints and develop an enhanced backpressure-based dynamic scheduling and routing algorithm. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the algorithm with extensive simulations.