• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.188-210
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• 2022

As a promising technique to support tremendous numbers of Internet of Things devices and a variety of applications efficiently, mobile edge computing (MEC) has attracted extensive studies recently. In this paper, we consider a MEC-assisted peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile communication system where MEC servers are deployed at access points to accelerate the communication process between mobile terminals. To capture the tradeoff between the time delay and the energy consumption of the system, a cost function is introduced to facilitate the optimization of the computation and communication resources. The formulated optimization problem is non-convex and is tackled by an iterative block coordinate descent algorithm that decouples the original optimization problem into two subproblems and alternately optimizes the computation and communication resources. Moreover, the MEC-assisted P2P communication system is compared with the conventional P2P communication system, then a condition is provided in closed-form expression when the MEC-assisted P2P communication system performs better. Simulation results show that the advantage of this system is enhanced when the computing capability of the receiver increases whereas it is reduced when the computing capability of the transmitter increases. In addition, the performance of this system is significantly improved when the signal-to-noise ratio of hop-1 exceeds that of hop-2.