Joint Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation in D2D Enabled MEC Networks

The mobile edge computing (MEC) and device-to-device (D2D) communications take advantage of the proximity for supporting high-speed mobile computing and high-rate data communications, respectively. In this paper, we integrate both techniques to further improve the computation capacity of the cellular networks by proposing the D2D-MEC technique. We aim to maximize the number of supported devices and formulate a mixed integer non-linear problem. To solve it, we decouple it into two subproblems and prove that the optimal solutions to the two subproblems compose the optimal solution to the original problem. The first one minimizes the required edge computation resource for a given D2D pair while the second one maximizes the number of supported devices via optimal D2D pairing. Then, by solving two subproblems, the optimal algorithm is developed and some insightful results are also highlighted. Finally, numerical results show that combining D2D communications with MEC can significantly enhance the computation capacity of the system.