Joint Uplink and Downlink Rate Splitting for Fog Computing-Enabled Internet of Medical Things

Abstract: The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) facilitates in-home electronic healthcare, transforming traditional hospital-based medical examination approaches. This paper proposes a novel transmit scheme for fog computing-enabled IoMT that leverages uplink and downlink rate splitting (RS). Fog computing allows offloading partial computation tasks to the edge server and processing the remainder of the tasks locally. The uplink RS and downlink RS utilize their flexible interference management capabilities to suppress offloading and feedback delay. Our overarching goal is to minimize the total time cost for task offloading, data processing, and result feedback. The resulting problem requires the joint design of task offloading, computing resource allocation, uplink beamforming, downlink beamforming, and common rate allocation. To solve the formulated non-convex problem, we introduce several auxiliary variables and then construct accurate surrogates to smooth the achievable rate. Moreover, we derive the optimal computation resource allocation per user with closed-form expressions. On this basis, we recast the computing resource allocation and energy consumption at the base station to a convex constraint set. We finally develop an alternating optimization algorithm to update the auxiliary variable and inherent variable alternately. Simulation results show that our transmit scheme and algorithm exhibit considerable performance enhancements over several benchmarks.