Joint Optimization for Cooperative Service-Caching, Computation-Offloading, and Resource-Allocations Over EH/MEC 6G Ultra-Dense Mobile Networks
Zhian Chen, Fei Wang, Xi Zhang · IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications · 2025
Service-caching, computation-offloading, and mobile edge-computing (MEC) have been widely recognized as three key 6G mobile wireless neworking techniques which can efficiently support implementing the ultra-dense networks (UDNs) with massive small-cell base stations (SBSs). But, these impose the new challenges for the UDNs to solely rely on grid power for energy supplying and to jointly optimize service-caching, computation-offloading, and resource-allocations. To overcome the above described difficulties, integrating energy-harvesting (EH) techniques with MEC-enabled 6G UDNs, we propose to develop the joint optimization schemes for cooperative service-caching, computation-offloading, and resource-allocations. In our considered UDNs, there exist a large number of EH-based stationary users (SUs) or mobile users (MUs), and a mixture of on-grid SBSs powered by electric grid and off-grid SBSs power-supplied by solar, radio frequency (RF) energy, etc. Specifically, first we formulate an energy minimization problem under a non-linear RF-energy EH model to minimize the sum of weighted energy consumption of users and off-grid SBSs. Second, for scenarios with SUs, we develop a two-timescale based joint cooperative service-caching, computation-offloading, and resource-allocations scheme using the hierarchical multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. We derive cooperative service-caching in each time frame, and then derive computation-offloading and resource-allocations in each time slot. Third, we extend our work to scenarios with MUs, where MUs can move with certain trajectories at low speeds. Finally, we validate and evaluate the performances of our proposed schemes through the extensive simulations.