  Ultra-low latency communication for mobile machines emerges as a critical
technology in Internet of Things (IoT). Proactive network association has been
suggested to support ultra-low latency communication with the assistance of
mobile edge computing. To resolve system dynamics and uncertainty, in this
paper, an online proactive network association is proposed to minimize average
task delay while considering time-average energy consumption constraints. Under
distributed computing and networking environments, we formulate an
event-triggered proactive network association model by semi-Markov task states
and independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) random events. Then we
facilitate the mobility-aware anticipatory network association to predictively
consider handover effects caused by the mobility. Based on the Markov decision
processes (MDP) and Lyapunov optimization, the two-stage online proactive
network association (TOPNA) decision algorithm is proposed without the
knowledge nor distribution of random events. Simulation results exhibit the
effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
