Task-Decoding Assisted Cooperative Transmission for Coded Edge Computing

The recent rise of computation-intensive and large-scale intelligence applications has spurred the growth of distributed edge computing, which however is often hampered by the so-called straggling effect. To this end, coded edge computing emerges as a promising solution by creating judiciously designed redundant computations using coding theory. However, existing schemes that make the edge nodes transmit their computing results independently turn out to be sub-optimal. Although collaboration is beneficial, to the best of our knowledge, an effective cooperative transmission scheme that is universally applicable to general task encoding schemes is still missing. With this consideration, a novel cooperative transmission scheme, termed task decoding-assisted TDMA, is proposed in this work, which employs overhearing and task-decoding to enable cooperative downlink transmission in coded edge computing. Besides, an analytic bound with closed-form expression and a more accurate algorithmic bound are derived for the average downlink delay of the proposed scheme. Simulations show that the proposed scheme can reduce the downlink delay of coded edge computing by orders of magnitude.