Computation Offloading and Activation of Mobile Edge Computing Servers: A Minority Game

Abstract: With the ever-increasing popularity of resource-intensive mobile applications, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), e.g., offloading computationally expensive tasks to the cellular edge, has become a prominent technology for the next generation wireless networks. Despite its great performance in terms of delay and energy, MEC suffers from restricted power allowance and computational capability of the edge nodes. Therefore, it is imperative to develop distributed mechanisms for computation offloading, so that not only the computational servers are utilized at their best capacity, but also the users' latency constraints are fulfilled. In this paper, by using the theory of Minority Games, we develop a novel distributed server activation mechanism for computational offloading. Our scheme guarantees energy-efficient activation of servers as well as satisfaction of users' quality-of-experience (QoE) requirements in terms of latency.