Task Scheduling of Joint Node Selection and Path Planning in Computing Power Network

Abstract

Cloud computing and mobile edge computing address the growing demand for computing power driven by the rise in data-intensive applications, but they are prone to creating computing silos, resulting in unbalanced resource utilization. To address this issue, the computing power network (CPN) has been introduced to enable the centralized management and scheduling of resources across the entire network. However, task scheduling in the CPN requires joint selection of computation nodes and routing paths, which greatly increases the complexity of the scheduling problem. In existing studies, heuristic methods are difficult to satisfy real-time requirements, whereas deep reinforcement learning methods ignore the collaborative optimization of network resources, making them difficult to adapt to complex CPN scenarios. To this end, we propose a task scheduling method for the CPN, called TS-DQNF. First, the method uses the Deep Q-Network (DQN) to determine the computation node for the computation task. Then, it introduces a dynamic congestion-aware mechanism to determine a low-cost routing path. Finally, it gradually obtains an effective task scheduling scheme through multiple rounds of alternating iterations. Simulation results show that the TS-DQNF improves the task success rate by 2.47–60.71% and reduces the average processing delay by 1.92–16.94% compared with other methods, while demonstrating good convergence performance.