Joint subcarrier and CPU time allocation for mobile edge computing

In mobile edge computing systems, mobile devices can offload compute-intensive tasks to a nearby \emph{cloudlet}, so as to save energy and extend battery life. Unlike a fully-fledged cloud, a cloudlet is a small-scale datacenter deployed at a wireless access point, and thus is highly constrained by both radio and compute resources. We show in this paper that separately optimizing the allocation of either compute or radio resource - as most existing works did - is highly \emph{suboptimal}: the congestion of compute resource leads to the waste of radio resource, and vice versa. To address this problem, we propose a joint scheduling algorithm that allocates both radio and compute resources coordinately. Specifically, we consider a cloudlet in an Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing Access (OFDMA) system with multiple mobile devices, where we study subcarrier allocation for task offloading and CPU time allocation for task execution in the cloudlet. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms per- resource optimization, accommodating more offloading requests while achieving salient energy saving.