  In order to support communication and computation cooperation, we propose
ME-RAN architecture, which consists of mobile edge cloud (ME) as the
computation provision platform and radio access network (RAN) as the
communication interface. Cooperative offloading framework is proposed to
achieve the following tasks: (1) to increase user equipment' (UE') computing
capacity by triggering offloading action, especially for the UE which cannot
complete the computation locally; (2) to reduce the energy consumption for all
the UEs by considering limited computing and communication resources. Based on
above objectives, we formulate the energy consumption minimization problem,
which is shown to be a non-convex mixed-integer programming. Firstly,
Decentralized Local Decision Algorithm (DLDA) is proposed for each UE to
estimate the possible local resource consumption and decide if offloading is in
its interest. This operation will reduce the overhead and signalling in the
later stage. Then, Centralized decision and resource Allocation algoRithm (CAR)
is proposed to conduct the decision making and resource allocation in ME-RAN.
Moreover, two low complexity algorithms, i.e., UE with largest saved energy
consumption accepted first (CAR-E) and UE with smallest required data rate
accepted first (CAR-D) are proposed. Simulations show that the performance of
the proposed algorithms is very close to the exhaustive search but with much
less complexity.
