Cooperative Computation for Multiuser Task Offloading in Wireless-Powered MEC Systems

Abstract

This paper investigates joint computing and relaying for multiuser task offloading in a wireless-powered mobile edge computing (MEC) system comprising an energy node (EN), an edge server (ES), and multiple energy-harvesting users. One user is selected as the helper for the remaining task users. Each task user partitions its workload among local computing, cooperative computing at the helper, and remote execution at the ES. During a parallel cooperation stage, the helper computes one portion of the uploaded tasks locally while forwarding the remaining portion to the ES and also processes its own task through local computing or edge offloading. The weighted sum computation rate (WSCR) is maximized by jointly optimizing helper selection, task partitioning, time allocation, transmission-energy allocation, and CPU-resource allocation under frame-duration, energy-neutrality, communication, and computation constraints. For each candidate helper, transmission-energy variables are introduced to decouple transmission time and power, and the perspective structure of the achievable-rate functions is exploited to reformulate the continuous resource-allocation problem as an equivalent convex problem. By solving the convex problem for all the candidate helpers, the globally optimal helper selection and resource allocation are obtained. The numerical results show that the proposed joint computing-and-relaying scheme consistently outperforms computing-only, relaying-only, and dedicated-helper cooperation. The performance gain stems from adaptively balancing helper computing and ES processing according to the prevailing communication, computation, and energy bottlenecks.