  In this paper, we consider a multi-user mobile edge computing (MEC) network
powered by wireless power transfer (WPT), where each energy-harvesting WD
follows a binary computation offloading policy, i.e., data set of a task has to
be executed as a whole either locally or remotely at the MEC server via task
offloading. In particular, we are interested in maximizing the (weighted) sum
computation rate of all the WDs in the network by jointly optimizing the
individual computing mode selection (i.e., local computing or offloading) and
the system transmission time allocation (on WPT and task offloading). The major
difficulty lies in the combinatorial nature of multi-user computing mode
selection and its strong coupling with transmission time allocation. To tackle
this problem, we first consider a decoupled optimization, where we assume that
the mode selection is given and propose a simple bi-section search algorithm to
obtain the conditional optimal time allocation. On top of that, a coordinate
descent method is devised to optimize the mode selection. The method is simple
in implementation but may suffer from high computational complexity in a
large-size network. To address this problem, we further propose a joint
optimization method based on the ADMM (alternating direction method of
multipliers) decomposition technique, which enjoys much slower increase of
computational complexity as the networks size increases. Extensive simulations
show that both the proposed methods can efficiently achieve near-optimal
performance under various network setups, and significantly outperform the
other representative benchmark methods considered.
