Optimizing MEC Networks for Healthcare Applications in 5G Communications With the Authenticity of Users’ Priorities

• Main Authors: Di Lin, Su Hu, Yuan Gao, Yu Tang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Mobile edge computing; healthcare applications; 5G mobile communications; blockchain; transmission delay; computation delay
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8736012/

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is pervasive to support high-speed end-to-end data transmission and computation for 5th generation (5G) mobile communications by offloading computation tasks to the cloud at the edge of a cellular base station. In a cellular network for healthcare applications, we must consider the different priorities of data transmission and computation by referring to the emergency levels of patients. A critical issue of determining the allocation of wireless resources among users is the authenticity of their priorities (i.e., emergency levels). Without authenticating the users' priorities, a user who advocates a higher emergency level can allocate more wireless resources, leading to the insufficient wireless resources to the users who are actually in high priorities. In this paper, we investigate the optimization of end-to-end delay of wireless users in a cellular network with the authenticity of their priorities by blockchain consensus and propose an algorithm of allocating communication and computation resources to minimize the delay of data transmission and computation. The numerical results illustrate that our proposed algorithm is capable of dramatically reducing the end-to-end delay under the various scenarios of healthcare applications.