Joint Device Association and Resource Allocation for Time-critical IoT Applications in MEC-empowered 5G Networks

Edge computing is emerging as an effective solution to fulfil the requirements of time-critical Internet of Things (IoT) applications by enabling the execution of data processing tasks at the network edge, in proximity to data producers. In particular, Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is attracting considerable interest in the mobile telco industry, as it supports edge computing capabilities within the mobile cellular network. However, to improve the network efficiency and QoS support of MEC systems, it is essential to jointly optimise edge resource management, IoT data collection and IoT device association in the context of heterogeneous services and edge resources. In this study, we address these challenges by first formulating the resource allocation, device association and data routing problem in a multi-cell MEC network as a mixed-integer non-linear programming problem that minimises the utilisation of communication and edge resources. We also propose a best-fit greedy heuristic method to determine an approximate solution to the optimisation problem for online resource management. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared to three alternative benchmarks.