Joint Communication and Computation Design for Mobile Embodied AI Network (MEAN)

This letter investigates the problem of energy efficient collaborative strategy for mobile embodied artificial intelligence network (MEAN) over wireless communication. In the considered model, the agents execute the tasks through collaboration, and they can switch between two operating modes based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and global collaboration. The dual-mode comprises the base station (BS)-assisted collaborative mode, in which agents make decisions through semantic communication with BS and then collaborate on tasks, and the local computing mode, in which the agents make decisions and execute tasks independently. Due to the dynamic wireless communication and flexible collaboration strategy, we jointly consider computation energy, communication energy, and task-execution energy with specific collaborative gains into a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the total system energy consumption. To solve it, we propose a lower-complexity enumeration algorithm: first, we get the optimal closed-form solution for semantic compression ratio and transmit power by proving the strict convexity. Second, we determine the scale of collaboration and the operating mode of each agent by a greedy sorting algorithm based on individual energy-saving potentials. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the total energy consumption compared to benchmark schemes.