Energy-Latency Aware Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Multi-Cell Mobile Edge Computing

The explosive development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to increased interest in mobile edge computing (MEC), which provides computational resources at network edges to accommodate computation-intensive and latency-sensitive applications. Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have gained attention as a solution to overcome blockage problems during the offloading uplink transmission in MEC systems. This paper explores IRS-aided multi-cell networks that enable servers to serve neighboring cells and cooperate to handle resource exhaustion. We aim to minimize the joint energy and latency cost by jointly optimizing the computation tasks, edge computing resources, user beamforming, and IRS phase shifts. The problem is decomposed into two subproblems—the MEC subproblem and the IRS communication subproblem—using the block coordinate descent (BCD) technique. The MEC subproblem is reformulated as a nonconvex quadratic constrained problem (QCP), while the IRS communication subproblem is transformed into a weight-sum-rate problem with auxiliary variables. We propose an efficient algorithm to alternately optimize the MEC resources and IRS communication variables. Numerical results show that our algorithm outperforms benchmarks and that multi-cell MEC systems achieve additional performance gains when supported by IRS.

I. Introduction

In recent years, the substantial growth of mobile devices (MDs) with limited memory space and computation power in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) era motivates the development of novel computational architectures [1], [2]. As an emerging network structure, mobile edge computing (MEC) pushes abundant computational resources to the edges of the networks [3]. This distributed computing paradigm tends to shorten the communication distance to meet the growing demand for novel intelligent applications such as augmented reality and virtual reality [4], [5], [6], [7], [8].