Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Mobile Edge Computing over Intermittent mmWave Links

TL;DR

This paper explores how reconfigurable intelligent surfaces can improve millimeter wave communication links in mobile edge computing, optimizing power and delay in dynamic, blocked environments using advanced stochastic and convex optimization techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a joint optimization framework for RIS, precoding, and computation resources in multi-user MIMO systems to enhance edge computing performance under intermittent mmWave links.

Findings

RIS significantly improves connectivity and delay performance.

The proposed method effectively balances power consumption and delay.

Performance gains are robust under various channel knowledge assumptions.

Abstract

The advent of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) in wireless communication networks unlocks the way to support high frequency radio access (e.g. in millimeter wave) while overcoming their sensitivity to the presence of deep fading and blockages. In support of this vision, this work exhibits the forward-looking perception of using RIS to enhance the connectivity of the communication links in edge computing scenarios, to support computation offloading services. We consider a multi-user MIMO system, and we formulate a long-term optimization problem aiming to ensure a bounded end-to-end delay with the minimum users average transmit power, by jointly selecting uplink user precoding, RIS reflectivity parameters, and computation resources at a mobile edge host. Thanks to the marriage of Lyapunov stochastic optimization, projected gradient techniques and convex optimization, the problem is efficiently solved in a per-slot basis, requiring only the observation of instantaneous realizations of time-varying radio channels and task arrivals, and that of communication and computing buffers. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of our method and the benefits of the RIS, in striking the best trade-off between power consumption and delay for different blocking conditions, also when different levels of channel knowledge are assumed.