Stochastic Buffer-Aided Relay-Assisted MEC

This paper studies buffer-aided relay-assisted Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) architecture as the fundamental system in hierarchical multi-hop MEC. We propose a stochastic offloading scheme where a buffer-aided relay, equipped with a computing server, randomly decides to process the tasks of a source node by its own server, or to forward them to the server of the next node in the hierarchy. We analyze the proposed scheme and formulate a problem to minimize the average response time in the system. We derive the feasible set and prove that the problem is a convex optimization problem which can be solved based on the one-dimensional search methods. Simulation results confirm the analytical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.