Empowering Mobile Edge Computing by Exploiting Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

Along with the proliferation of sensors and of smart devices, an explosive volume of data will be generated. However, restricted by their limited physical sizes and low manufacturing costs, these wireless devices are typically equipped with limited computational capabilities and battery lives and thus incapable of processing data time-efficiently. To overcome this issue, the paradigm of mobile edge computing (MEC) is proposed, where wireless devices may offload all or a fraction of their computation tasks to their nearby computing nodes deployed at the network edge. At the time of writing, the benefits of MEC systems have not been fully exploited, predominately because the computation offloading link is still far from the perfect. In this article, we propose to empower the MEC systems by exploiting the emerging technique of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, which is capable of reconfiguring the wireless propagation environments and hence of enhancing the offloading links. The beneficial role of RISs can be exploited by jointly optimizing both the RISs as well as communications and computing resource allocations of MEC systems, which imposes new research challenges on the systemic design and thus necessitates a specific investigation. Against this background, this article provides an overview of RIS-assisted MEC systems and highlights their four use cases as well as their design challenges and solutions. Then their advantageous performance is validated with the aid of a specific case study. Finally, a guide on future research opportunities is elucidated.