AoI-Aware Optimization of Service Caching-Assisted Offloading and Resource Allocation in Edge Cellular Networks

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to computational offloading at the edge; this is a promising paradigm for achieving intelligence everywhere. As offloading can lead to more traffic in cellular networks, cache technology is used to alleviate the channel burden. For example, a deep neural network (DNN)-based inference task requires a computation service that involves running libraries and parameters. Thus, caching the service package is necessary for repeatedly running DNN-based inference tasks. On the other hand, as the DNN parameters are usually trained in distribution, IoT devices need to fetch up-to-date parameters for inference task execution. In this work, we consider the joint optimization of computation offloading, service caching, and the AoI metric. We formulate a problem to minimize the weighted sum of the average completion delay, energy consumption, and allocated bandwidth. Then, we propose the AoI-aware service caching-assisted offloading framework (ASCO) to solve it, which consists of the method of Lagrange multipliers with the KKT condition-based offloading module (LMKO), the Lyapunov optimization-based learning and update control module (LLUC), and the Kuhn–Munkres (KM) algorithm-based channel-division fetching module (KCDF). The simulation results demonstrate that our ASCO framework achieves superior performance in regard to time overhead, energy consumption, and allocated bandwidth. It is verified that our ASCO framework not only benefits the individual task but also the global bandwidth allocation.