Softwarization of Mobile Network Functions towards Agile and Energy Efficient 5G Architectures: A Survey <s> Optimization problem <s> The last decade has seen a rapid growth in the use of mobile devices all over the world. With an increasing use of mobile devices, mobile applications are becoming more diverse and complex, demanding more computational resources. However, mobile devices are typically resource-limited (i.e., a slower-speed CPU, a smaller memory) due to a variety of reasons. Mobile users will be capable of running applications with heavy computation if they can offload some of their computations to other places, such as a desktop or server machines. However, mobile users are typically subject to dynamically changing network environments, particularly, due to user mobility. This makes it hard to choose good offloading decisions in mobile environments. In general, users’ mobility can provide some hints for upcoming changes to network environments. Motivated by this, we propose a mobility model of each individual user taking advantage of the regularity of his/her mobility pattern, and develop an offloading decision-making technique based on the mobility model. We evaluate our technique through trace-based simulation with real log data traces from 14 Android users. Our evaluation results show that the proposed technique can help boost the performance of mobile devices in terms of response time and energy consumption, when users are highly mobile. <s> BIB001 </s> Softwarization of Mobile Network Functions towards Agile and Energy Efficient 5G Architectures: A Survey <s> Optimization problem <s> The emergence of mobile cloud computing enables mobile users to offload applications to nearby mobile resource-rich devices (i.e., cloudlets) to reduce energy consumption and improve performance. However, due to mobility and cloudlet capacity, the connections between a mobile user and mobile cloudlets can be intermittent. As a result, offloading actions taken by the mobile user may fail (e.g., the user moves out of communication range of cloudlets). In this paper, we develop an optimal offloading algorithm for the mobile user in such an intermittently connected cloudlet system, considering the users’ local load and availability of cloudlets. We examine users’ mobility patterns and cloudlets’ admission control, and derive the probability of successful offloading actions analytically. We formulate and solve a Markov decision process (MDP) model to obtain an optimal policy for the mobile user with the objective to minimize the computation and offloading costs. Furthermore, we prove that the optimal policy of the MDP has a threshold structure. Subsequently, we introduce a fast algorithm for energy-constrained users to make offloading decisions. The numerical results show that the analytical form of the successful offloading probability is a good estimation in various mobility cases. Furthermore, the proposed MDP offloading algorithm for mobile users outperforms conventional baseline schemes. <s> BIB002 </s> Softwarization of Mobile Network Functions towards Agile and Energy Efficient 5G Architectures: A Survey <s> Optimization problem <s> Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm to provide cloud-computing capabilities in close proximity to mobile devices in fifth-generation (5G) networks. In this paper, we study energy-efficient computation offloading (EECO) mechanisms for MEC in 5G heterogeneous networks. We formulate an optimization problem to minimize the energy consumption of the offloading system, where the energy cost of both task computing and file transmission are taken into consideration. Incorporating the multi-access characteristics of the 5G heterogeneous network, we then design an EECO scheme, which jointly optimizes offloading and radio resource allocation to obtain the minimal energy consumption under the latency constraints. Numerical results demonstrate energy efficiency improvement of our proposed EECO scheme. <s> BIB003 </s> Softwarization of Mobile Network Functions towards Agile and Energy Efficient 5G Architectures: A Survey <s> Optimization problem <s> Achieving long battery lives or even self sustainability has been a long standing challenge for designing mobile devices. This paper presents a novel solution that seamlessly integrates two technologies, mobile cloud computing and microwave power transfer (MPT), to enable computation in passive low-complexity devices such as sensors and wearable computing devices. Specifically, considering a single-user system, a base station (BS) either transfers power to or offloads computation from a mobile to the cloud; the mobile uses harvested energy to compute given data either locally or by offloading. A framework for energy efficient computing is proposed that comprises a set of policies for controlling CPU cycles for the mode of local computing, time division between MPT and offloading for the other mode of offloading, and mode selection. Given the CPU-cycle statistics information and channel state information (CSI), the policies aim at maximizing the probability of successfully computing given data, called computing probability , under the energy harvesting and deadline constraints. The policy optimization is translated into the equivalent problems of minimizing the mobile energy consumption for local computing and maximizing the mobile energy savings for offloading which are solved using convex optimization theory. The structures of the resultant policies are characterized in closed form. Furthermore, given non-causal CSI, the said analytical framework is further developed to support computation load allocation over multiple channel realizations, which further increases the computing probability. Last, simulation demonstrates the feasibility of wirelessly powered mobile cloud computing and the gain of its optimal control. <s> BIB004 </s> Softwarization of Mobile Network Functions towards Agile and Energy Efficient 5G Architectures: A Survey <s> Optimization problem <s> Mobile edge computing (a.k.a. fog computing) has recently emerged to enable \emph{in-situ} processing of delay-sensitive applications at the edge of mobile networks. Providing grid power supply in support of mobile edge computing, however, is costly and even infeasible (in certain rugged or under-developed areas), thus mandating on-site renewable energy as a major or even sole power supply in increasingly many scenarios. Nonetheless, the high intermittency and unpredictability of renewable energy make it very challenging to deliver a high quality of service to users in renewable-powered mobile edge computing systems. In this paper, we address the challenge of incorporating renewables into mobile edge computing and propose an efficient reinforcement learning-based resource management algorithm, which learns on-the-fly the optimal policy of dynamic workload offloading (to centralized cloud) and edge server provisioning to minimize the long-term system cost (including both service delay and operational cost). Our online learning algorithm uses a decomposition of the (offline) value iteration and (online) reinforcement learning, thus achieving a significant improvement of learning rate and run-time performance when compared to standard reinforcement learning algorithms such as Q-learning. <s> BIB005 </s> Softwarization of Mobile Network Functions towards Agile and Energy Efficient 5G Architectures: A Survey <s> Optimization problem <s> Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm to meet the ever-increasing computation demands from mobile applications. By offloading the computationally intensive workloads to the MEC server, the quality of computation experience, e.g., the execution latency, could be greatly improved. Nevertheless, as the on-device battery capacities are limited, computation would be interrupted when the battery energy runs out. To provide satisfactory computation performance as well as achieving green computing, it is of significant importance to seek renewable energy sources to power mobile devices via energy harvesting (EH) technologies. In this paper, we will investigate a green MEC system with EH devices and develop an effective computation offloading strategy. The execution cost , which addresses both the execution latency and task failure, is adopted as the performance metric. A low-complexity online algorithm is proposed, namely, the Lyapunov optimization-based dynamic computation offloading algorithm, which jointly decides the offloading decision, the CPU-cycle frequencies for mobile execution, and the transmit power for computation offloading. A unique advantage of this algorithm is that the decisions depend only on the current system state without requiring distribution information of the computation task request, wireless channel, and EH processes. The implementation of the algorithm only requires to solve a deterministic problem in each time slot, for which the optimal solution can be obtained either in closed form or by bisection search. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is shown to be asymptotically optimal via rigorous analysis. Sample simulation results shall be presented to corroborate the theoretical analysis as well as validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. <s> BIB006 </s> Softwarization of Mobile Network Functions towards Agile and Energy Efficient 5G Architectures: A Survey <s> Optimization problem <s> Merging Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), which is an emerging paradigm to meet the increasing computation demands from mobile devices, with the dense deployment of Base Stations (BSs), is foreseen as a key step towards the next generation mobile networks. However, new challenges arise for designing energy efficient networks since radio access resources and computing resources of BSs have to be jointly managed, and yet they are complexly coupled with traffic in both spatial and temporal domains. In this paper, we address the challenge of incorporating MEC into dense cellular networks, and propose an efficient online algorithm, called ENGINE (ENerGy constrained offloadINg and slEeping) which makes joint computation offloading and BS sleeping decisions in order to maximize the quality of service while keeping the energy consumption low. Our algorithm leverages Lyapunov optimization technique, works online and achieves a close-to-optimal performance without using future information. Our simulation results show that our algorithm can effectively reduce energy consumption while guaranteeing quality of service for users. <s> BIB007 </s> Softwarization of Mobile Network Functions towards Agile and Energy Efficient 5G Architectures: A Survey <s> Optimization problem <s> This paper proposes a novel joint computation and communication cooperation approach in mobile edge computing (MEC) systems, which enables user cooperation in both computation and communication for improving the MEC performance. In particular, we consider a basic three-node MEC system that consists of a user node, a helper node, and an access point (AP) node attached with an MEC server. We focus on the user's latency-constrained computation over a finite block, and develop a four-slot protocol for implementing the joint computation and communication cooperation. Under this setup, we jointly optimize the computation and communication resource allocation at both the user and the helper, so as to minimize their total energy consumption subject to the user's computation latency constraint. We provide the optimal solution to this problem. Numerical results show that the proposed joint cooperation approach significantly improves the computation capacity and the energy efficiency at the user and helper nodes, as compared to other benchmark schemes without such a joint design. <s> BIB008
Optimization technique EE computation offloading under tasks delay constraints BIB003 Maximum cardinality bin packing problem EE multiuser resource allocation BIB004 Dual decomposition, partial Lagrange Joint computation and communication cooperation BIB008 Lagrange duality, ellipsoid method Optimal offloading and autoscaling decision making in EH powered MEC systems BIB005 Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning Computation and offloading execution cost minimization for MEC systems BIB006 Lyapunov optimization Mobility aware offloading decision BIB001 Mobility patterns and heuristics Minimizing computation and offloading costs under intermittent connectivity BIB002 Markov decision processes Maximizing edge computation performance under energy constraint  Lyapunov optimization and multi-armed bandits also yield EE improvements BIB007 . EH can also be integrated with EE policies, reducing the carbon footprint of network deployments. Since future EPC architectural designs will consist of a virtualized infrastructure, understanding VM power metering is key towards reducing the power consumption in virtualized data centers. This enables the design and implementation of new power management algorithms that improve EE within the network.