Enabling edge cooperation in tactile internet via 3C resource sharing

Tactile Internet often requires: 1) the ultra-reliable and ultra-responsive network connection and 2) the proactive and intelligent actuation at edge devices. A promising approach to address these requirements is to enable mobile edge devices to share their communication, computation, and caching (3C) resources via device-to-device connections. In this paper, we propose a general 3C resource sharing framework, which includes many existing 1C/2C sharing models in the literature as special cases. Comparing with the 1C/2C models, the proposed 3C framework can further improve the resource utilization efficiency by offering more flexibilities in terms of the device cooperation and resource scheduling. As a typical example, we focus on the energy utilization under the proposed 3C framework. Specifically, we formulate an energy consumption minimization problem, which is an integer non-convex optimization problem. To solve the problem, we first transform it into an equivalent integer linear programming problem that is much easier to solve. Then, we propose a heuristic algorithm based on linear programming, which can further reduce the computation time and produce an empirically close-to-optimal solution. Moreover, we evaluate the energy reduction due to the 3C sharing both analytically and numerically. Numerical results show that, comparing with the existing 1C/2C approaches, the proposed 3C sharing framework can reduce the total energy consumption by 83.8% when the D2D energy is negligible. The energy reduction is still 27.5% when the D2D transmission energy per unit time is twice as large as the cellular transmission energy per unit time.