The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently advanced from an experimental technology to what will become the backbone of future customer value for both product and service sector businesses. This underscores the cardinal role of IoT on the journey toward the fifth generation of wireless communication systems. IoT technologies augmented with intelligent and big data analytics are expected to rapidly change the landscape of myriads of application domains ranging from health care to smart cities and industrial automations. The emergence of multi-access edge computing (MEC) technology aims at extending cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the radio access network, hence providing real-time, high-bandwidth, low-latency access to radio network resources. IoT is identified as a key use case of MEC, given MEC’s ability to provide cloud platform and gateway services at the network edge. MEC will inspire the development of myriads of applications and services with demand for ultralow latency and high quality of service due to its dense geographical distribution and wide support for mobility. MEC is therefore an important enabler of IoT applications and services which require real-time operations. In this survey, we provide a holistic overview on the exploitation of MEC technology for the realization of IoT applications and their synergies. We further discuss the technical aspects of enabling MEC in IoT and provide some insight into various other integration technologies therein.
A preliminary study on how computation offloading and bandwidth allocation can be performed in MEC supportive IoT networks is presented in @cite_44 . Due to the discrete and coarse-grained offloading levels on the IoT end nodes, the gateway (i.e. MEC server) bandwidth will be under-utilized. This phenomenon is termed fragmentation. Based on the received transmission rates and power consumption parameters of IoT devices, the gateway runs an iterative algorithm to optimally allocate bandwidth in such a way as to optimize the battery life of the devices. The implementation of the algorithm for a health monitoring application shows more than 40
@cite_44
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With the proliferation of portable and mobile IoT devices and their increasing processing capability, we witness that the edge of network is moving to the IoT gateways and smart devices. To avoid Big Data issues (e.g. high latency of cloud based IoT), the processing of the captured data is starting from the IoT edge node. However, the available processing capabilities and energy resources are still limited and do not allow to fully process the data on-board. It calls for offloading some portions of computation to the gateway or servers. Due to the limited bandwidth of the IoT gateways, choosing the offloading levels of connected devices and allocating bandwidth to them is a challenging problem. This paper proposes a technique for managing computation offloading in a local IoT network under bandwidth constraints. The existing bandwidth allocation and computation offloading management techniques underutilize the gateway's resources (e.g. bandwidth) due to the fragmentation issue. This issue stems from the discrete coarse-grained choices (i.e. offloading levels) on the IoT end nodes. Our proposed technique addresses this issue, and utilizes the available resources of the gateway effectively. The experimental results show on average 1 hour (up to 1.5 hour) improvement in battery life of edge devices. The utilization of gateway's bandwidth increased by 40 . Mobile edge computing (MEC) has attracted great interests as a promising approach to augment computational capabilities of mobile devices. An important issue in the MEC paradigm is computation offloading. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for computation offloading and interference management in wireless cellular networks with MEC. In this integrated framework, we formulate the computation offloading decision, physical resource block (PRB) allocation, and MEC computation resource allocation as optimization problems. The MEC server makes the offloading decision according to the local computation overhead estimated by all user equipments (UEs) and the offloading overhead estimated by the MEC server itself. Then, the MEC server performs the PRB allocation using the graph coloring method. The outcomes of the offloading decision and PRB allocation are then used to distribute the computation resource of the MEC server to the UEs. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme with different system parameters. Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged as a prominent technology to liberate mobile devices from computationally intensive workloads, by offloading them to the proximate MEC server. To make offloading effective, the radio and computational resources need to be dynamically managed, to cope with the time-varying computation demands and wireless fading channels. In this paper, we develop an online joint radio and computational resource management algorithm for multi-user MEC systems, with the objective of minimizing the long-term average weighted sum power consumption of the mobile devices and the MEC server, subject to a task buffer stability constraint. Specifically, at each time slot, the optimal CPU-cycle frequencies of the mobile devices are obtained in closed forms, and the optimal transmit power and bandwidth allocation for computation offloading are determined with the Gauss-Seidel method ; while for the MEC server, both the optimal frequencies of the CPU cores and the optimal MEC server scheduling decision are derived in closed forms. Besides, a delay-improved mechanism is proposed to reduce the execution delay. Rigorous performance analysis is conducted for the proposed algorithm and its delay-improved version, indicating that the weighted sum power consumption and execution delay obey an @math tradeoff with @math as a control parameter. Simulation results are provided to validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the impacts of various parameters. Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and mobile edge computing (MEC) have been emerging as promising techniques in narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) systems to provide ubiquitously connected IoT devices with efficient transmission and computation. However, the successive interference cancellation (SIC) ordering of NOMA has become the bottleneck limiting the performance improvement for the uplink transmission, which is the dominant traffic flow of NB-IoT communications. Also, in order to guarantee the fairness of task execution latency across NB-IoT devices, the computation resource of MEC units has to be fairly allocated to tasks from IoT devices according to the task size. For these reasons, we investigate the joint optimization of SIC ordering and computation resource allocation in this paper. Specifically, we formulate a combinatorial optimization problem with the objective to minimize the maximum task execution latency required per task bit across NB-IoT devices under the limitation of computation resource. We prove the NP-hardness of this joint optimization problem. To tackle this challenging problem, we first propose an optimal algorithm to obtain the optimal SIC ordering and computation resource allocation in two stages: the convex computation resource allocation optimization followed by the combinatorial SIC ordering optimization. To reduce the computational complexity, we design an efficient heuristic algorithm for the SIC ordering optimization. As a good feature, the proposed low-complexity algorithm suffers a negligible performance degradation in comparison with the optimal algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the benefits of NOMA in reducing the task execution latency.