Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces Enhanced Mobile Edge Computing: Minimizing the Maximum Computational Time

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) and mobile edge computing (MEC) have recently attracted significant attention in academia and industry. Without consuming any external energy, IRS can extend wireless coverage by smartly reconfiguring the phase shift of a signal towards the receiver with the help of passive elements. On the other hand, MEC has the ability to reduce latency by providing extensive computational facilities to users. This paper proposes a new optimization scheme for IRS-enhanced mobile edge computing to minimize the maximum computational time of the end users’ tasks. The optimization problem is formulated to simultaneously optimize the task segmentation and transmission power of users, phase shift design of IRS, and computational resource of mobile edge. The optimization problem is non-convex and coupled on multiple variables which make it very complex. Therefore, we transform it to convex by decoupling it into sub-problems and then obtain an efficient solution. In particular, the closed-form solutions for task segmentation and edge computational resources are achieved through the monotonical relation of time and Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions, while the transmission power of users and phase shift design of IRS are computed using the convex optimization technique. The proposed IRS-enhanced optimization scheme is compared with edge computing nave offloading, binary offloading, and edge computing, respectively. Numerical results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed scheme compared to other benchmark schemes.