A novel D2D–MEC method for enhanced computation capability in cellular networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communications and mobile edge computing (MEC) used to resolve traffic overload problems is a trend in the cellular network. By jointly considering the computation capability and the maximum delay, resource-constrained terminals offload parts of their computation-intensive tasks to one nearby device via a D2D connection or an edge server deployed at a base station via a cellular connection. In this paper, a novel method of cellular D2D–MEC system is proposed, which enables task offloading and resource allocation meanwhile improving the execution efficiency of each device with a low latency. We consider the partial offloading strategy and divide the task into local and remote computing, both of which can be executed in parallel through different computational modes. Instead of allocating system resources from a macroscopic view, we innovatively study both the task offloading strategy and the computing efficiency of each device from a microscopic perspective. By taking both task offloading policy and computation resource allocation into consideration, the optimization problem is formulated as that of maximized computing efficiency. As the formulated problem is a mixed-integer non-linear problem, we thus propose a two-phase heuristic algorithm by jointly considering helper selection and computation resources allocation. In the first phase, we obtain the suboptimal helper selection policy. In the second phase, the MEC computation resources allocation strategy is achieved. The proposed low complexity dichotomy algorithm (LCDA) is used to match the subtask-helper pair. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed D2D-enhanced MEC system over some traditional D2D–MEC algorithms.