Computation-efficient Hybrid Offloading for Backscatter-assisted Wirelessly Powered MEC

Abstract

Computation efficiency (CE) is crucial to mobile edge computing (MEC) for intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) applications, in addition to energy efficiency. To improve CE, this paper designs a backscatter-assisted wireless powered MEC network, where IoT terminals can partially offload their computation tasks via hybrid offloading through harvest-then-transmit protocol and/or backscatter communications. In particular, a CE maximization problem is formulated from a system perspective and an iterative algorithm is developed to tackle the problem, by using the Dinkelbach and Lagrangian duality methods. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme over competing ones and the flexibility in achieving trade-offs between different computation and communication modes.