Driven by diverse applications, radio access networks (RAN) are expected to embrace built-in computing and intelligence, forming a versatile wireless computing platform that closely integrates communication and computing. To fully unleash the potential of such a synergistic system, it is essential to coordinate communication and computing with intelligence unlocked by the radio intelligent controllers (RICs) in O-RAN. Building on the groundwork established by existing theoretical studies and simulations, we develop a platform that can emulate the events in the real-world system in more detail, bringing theoretical works closer to practical implementation. In this paper, we first introducens-GP-O-RAN, a software simulation platform developed over ns-3, enabling communication, computation task processing, large-scale data collection, and testing of system-level orchestration policies through user-level control. Taking virtual reality (VR) as an example, we formulate the computation offloading problem and develop a prediction-based computation offloading xAPP, which contains a prediction phase to predict users’ end-to-end (E2E) performance with the deep neural network and a system-level decision-making phase for global orchestration with the differential evolution algorithm. We evaluate the system capacity and E2E latency over the developed ns-GP-O-RAN, which is more effective than existing approaches.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as an essential technology for latency-critical applications by providing computing services in close proximity to mobile users. Bringing MEC to come into practice, how to support user mobility remains challenging. In addition to seeking a thorny tradeoff between service latency and migration cost, both interactions in space and time exist in mobility management, which requires collaboration among users and perfect prior knowledge, including user mobility and network information. In this article, we propose an efficient mobility management framework for MEC networks, in which mobility management is operated centered around users’ performance and cost, while radio access and computing service provision are loosely coupled. With a loosely coupled design, the proposed framework exhibits more flexibility and incurs higher complexity. Focusing on multiuser and multicell MEC networks, this joint control problem is formulated to maximize the long-term total utility accounting for the service delay and migration cost. Considering the exponential complexity, a distributed mobility management approach is developed, which combines game theory and user-oriented deep reinforcement learning to deal with the interactions in space and time. Simulation results show the efficiency and scalability of the proposed approach.

Nowadays, many disruptive Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications emerge, such as augmented/virtual reality online games, autonomous driving, and smart everything, which are massive in number, data intensive, computation intensive, and delay sensitive. Due to the mismatch between the fifth generation (5G) and the requirements of such massive IoT-enabled applications, there is a need for technological advancements and evolutions for wireless communications and networking toward the sixth-generation (6G) networks. 6G is expected to deliver extended 5G capabilities at a very high level, such as Tbps data rate, sub-ms latency, cm-level localization, and so on, which will play a significant role in supporting massive IoT devices to operate seamlessly with highly diverse service requirements. Motivated by the aforementioned facts, in this article, we present a comprehensive survey on 6G-enabled massive IoT. First, we present the drivers and requirements by summarizing the emerging IoT-enabled applications and the corresponding requirements, along with the limitations of 5G. Second, visions of 6G are provided in terms of core technical requirements, use cases, and trends. Third, a new network architecture provided by 6G to enable massive IoT is introduced, i.e., space-air-ground-underwater/sea networks enhanced by edge computing. Fourth, some breakthrough technologies, such as machine learning and blockchain, in 6G are introduced, where the motivations, applications, and open issues of these technologies for massive IoT are summarized. Finally, a use case of fully autonomous driving is presented to show 6G supports massive IoT.

In this paper, we present a blockchain-based mobile edge computing (B-MEC) framework for adaptive resource allocation and computation offloading in future wireless networks, where the blockchain works as an overlaid system to provide management and control functions. In this framework, how to reach a consensus between the nodes while simultaneously guaranteeing the performance of both MEC and blockchain systems is a major challenge. Meanwhile, resource allocation, block size, and the number of consecutive blocks produced by each producer are critical to the performance of B-MEC. Therefore, an adaptive resource allocation and block generation scheme is proposed. To improve the throughput of the overlaid blockchain system and the quality of services (QoS) of the users in the underlaid MEC system, spectrum allocation, size of the blocks, and number of producing blocks for each producer are formulated as a joint optimization problem, where the time-varying wireless links and computation capacity of the MEC servers are considered. Since this problem is intractable using traditional methods, we resort to the deep reinforcement learning approach. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach by comparing with other baseline methods.

To tackle the contradiction between the computation intensive applications and the resource-hungry mobile user equipments (UEs), mobile edge computing (MEC) has been provisioned as a promising solution, which enables the UEs to offload the tasks to the MEC servers. Considering the characteristics of small cell networks (SCNs), integrating MEC into SCNs is natural. But in terms of the high interference, multi-access property, and limited resources of small cell base stations (SBSs), an efficient computation offloading scheme is essential. However, there still lack comprehensive studies on this problem in the densely deployed SCNs. In this paper, we study the energy-efficient computation offloading management scheme in the MEC system with SCNs. The aim of this paper is to minimize the energy consumption of all UEs via jointly optimizing computation offloading decision making, spectrum, power, and computation resource allocation. Specially, the UEs need not only to decide whether to offload but also to determine where to offload. First, we present the computation offloading model and formulate this problem as a mix integer non-linear programming problem, which is NP-hard. Taking advantages of genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), we design a suboptimal algorithm named as hierarchical GA and PSO-based computation algorithm to solve this problem. Finally, the convergence of this algorithm is studied by simulation, and the performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by comparing with the other baseline algorithms.

The rapidly growing mobile traffic calls for higher quality of service (QoS) and lower on-grid energy cost. Integrating energy harvesting (EH) to small cell network (SCN) with caching has been regarded as a promising solution. However, considering the limited resource of the small cell base stations (SBSs), how to cache contents and serve the mobile users (MUs) is a crucial problem. In this paper, we design a green content caching mechanism in the SCN, where the number of MUs' content requests handled by the SBSs is maximized. First, the content caching problem is formulated, which is NP-hard. To decrease the complexity of the problem, we divide it into two subproblems: MU-BS association and content placement. When the number of SBSs is large, the two subproblems can't be efficiently solved by conventional centralized approaches. Thus we adopt the exact potential game (EPG) to model the subproblems. Finally, we propose a two-dimensional iteration algorithm (TDIA) to solve the proposed problem. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve significant performance.