Edge Computing: System Overview and Fusion with Wireless Power Transfer

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged as a new communications/computing concept that is able to tackle the limited computing capabilities of practical IoT devices. It is characterized by “outsourcing” the computation functions from the user device to the network edge, usually to the base station. In this way, computation-intensive and time-sensitive computations for some applications can be realized by MEC servers that have practically unlimited computing resources. This paper provides a broad outlook on the MEC concept and technology, including architecture and applicable communication/computation model for its design and analysis. We also study the promising idea for the merger between MEC and the wireless power transfer (WPT), which further strengthens the MEC concept due to the feasibility of end devices with perpetual power supply. For a simple WPT-assisted MEC network, we propose a resource allocation scheme that guarantees fairness among the energy harvesting users. The resulting computation rates make the proposed scheme attractive for practical purposes.