Exploiting Joint Computation Offloading and Data Caching to Enhance Mobile Terminal Performance

A novel scheme is proposed for mobile edge computing systems to efficiently improve the performance of the inter-communications between mobile applications running in mobile terminals and their clouds located at remote servers. In the scheme, basestations are equipped with computing power and data storage to jointly offload the computation from terminals and cache the data from clouds. Considering the mobile terminals under the non-overlapping and overlapping areas covered by multiple basestations, we design a joint offloading and caching model, and formulate an optimization problem. Then, a resource management algorithm, which jointly schedules computation offloading and allocates data caching for computation/data requests sent by mobile terminals, is developed using Genetic Algorithm. The total delays generated in inter-communications can be minimized by the basestations based on optimal offloading/caching decisions. Simulation results demonstrate our scheme can reach optimality efficiently in different scenarios with variable parameters, and it outperforms traditional schemes with neither, either offloading and caching.