Joint Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation in C-RAN With MEC Based on Spectrum Efficiency

Abstract

The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) with mobile edge computing (MEC) structure which consists of a baseband unit (BBU) pool integrating with an MEC server and several remote radio heads (RRHs) beside the mobile terminals can help users with computational resource-intensive tasks and bring extra profits to network operator at the same time. This paper presents a novel task-aware C-RAN with MEC structure and formulates a profit maximization problem by jointly optimizing offloading strategy, radio and computational resources allocation under the constraints of offloading latency, fronthaul capacity along with limited bandwidth and computational resource. To solve this NP-hard optimization problem in a distributed and efficient way, we propose a spectrum efficiency (SE)-based joint optimization for offloading and resource allocation (SJOORA) scheme which decomposes the original problem into two sub-problems. A SE-based offloading strategy is proposed with confirmed resource allocation, and on the other hand, bandwidth and computational resource allocation problem is solved by using a Lagrangian multiplier method with predetermined offloading strategy. Finally, by solving these two sub-problems iteratively, a suboptimal solution is obtained for the original problem. The simulation results show that the proposed SJOORA scheme can effectively increase the profit of network operator with relative lower complexity.