Integrated Sensing and Communication Assisted Mobile Edge Computing: An Energy-Efficient Design via Intelligent Reflecting Surface

In this letter, we propose an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) assisted energy-efficient mobile edge computing (MEC). To address the performance degradation due to interference between the radar sensing and MEC, we leverage advanced intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to improve both the performance of the radar sensing and MEC. We adopt the radar estimation information rate as a performance measure of the radar sensing and further characterize the mutual influence between computation offloading transmission in MEC and radar sensing by accounting for the assistance of IRS. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total energy consumption of all devices meanwhile satisfying both the radar estimation information rate requirement as well as the latency constraint for computation offloading. We propose an efficient algorithm to optimize the computing and communication resources. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme of IRS assisted ISAC MEC for energy minimization.

I. Introduction

Mobile edge computing (MEC), which allows mobile devices to offload their computation workloads to the edge server, provides a promising paradigm for enabling computation-intensive yet latency-sensitive applications. Radar sensing is a wireless perception technology which captures the information of the target by analyzing the received target echo signal. Recently, the growing development of the integration of sensing and communication (ISAC) provides a promising paradigm for the integration of radar sensing and MEC. In [1], Zhang et al. investigated the acceleration of edge intelligence via ISAC. In [2], Liang et al. investigated throughput maximization in a multi-user MEC system with a sense-then-offload protocol. In [3], Qi et al. studied a traffic-aware task offloading scheme in vehicular network and proposed an offloading mechanism based on the environment data sensed. However, it is still an open problem for the resource allocation between the radar sensing and offloading transmission in ISAC assisted MEC.