Revisiting Wireless-Powered MEC: A Cooperative Energy Recycling Framework for Task-Energy Co-Design

Cooperative energy recycling (CER) offers a new way to boost energy utilization in wireless-powered multi-access edge computing (MEC) networks, yet its integration with computation–communication co-design remains underexplored. This paper proposes a CER-enabled MEC framework that maximizes the minimum computable data among users under energy causality, latency, and power constraints. The intractable problem is reformulated into a convex form through relaxation, maximum ratio combining, and variable substitution, and closed-form solutions are derived via Lagrangian duality and alternating optimization, offering analytical insights. Simulation results verify that the proposed CER mechanism markedly increases total computable data while maintaining equitable performance across heterogeneous users.