TL;DR
A Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) model with the objective of a weighted sum of long-term average task completion rate, total latency and energy consumption is established, which improves the task completion rate by 4% in high load scenarios and achieves a better balance between latency and energy consumption.
A task scheduling method using the Deep Q-Network to determine the computation node for the computation task and a dynamic congestion-aware mechanism to determine a low-cost routing path is proposed, which gradually obtains an effective task scheduling scheme through multiple rounds of alternating iterations.
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technologies, leading to the explosive growth of intelligent applications characterized by resource intensity and latency sensitivity, such as image processing and smart home. In practice, an application typically consists of multiple tasks with execution dependencies, where the output of some tasks serves as the input for specific others. Recently, the design of computation offloading methods for such execution-dependent tasks has received extensive research. However, computation offloading for execution-dependent tasks with service dependencies in resource-constrained multi-user, multi-edge-server cooperative MEC systems has not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we formulate a cooperative computation offloading problem for dual-dependency tasks in multi-edge-server scenarios with limited service and computing resources, aiming to minimize the long-term average service delay for multiple users. To solve this problem, we propose a recurrent multi-agent reinforcement learning-based dual-dependency task offloading (RMA-DepO) algorithm, which enables users to communicate during training to explore and learn optimal joint task offloading and computing resource allocation strategies, and to make distributed offloading decisions at execution time. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RMA-DepO algorithm outperforms several baselines under different network settings, demonstrating its effectiveness in coordinating edge resources for cooperative computation of dual-dependency tasks.
Dynamic edge networks suffer from fluctuating bandwidth, latency, and edge-node load, which weaken conventional task offloading strategies under deadline and energy constraints. This study proposes an adaptive task offloading strategy based on dynamic network states. An online broad learning system predicts short-term bandwidth, transmission delay, and load from sliding-window observations. The predictions are embedded into a model predictive control framework for rolling optimization of the local-edge task allocation ratio, while confidence-interval-guided compensation adjusts decisions under prediction uncertainty. ADMM is used for distributed solution. NS-3/Python simulations show that the proposed method achieves a $93\%$ task success rate, 1.22 W average terminal energy consumption, 3.2 switches/s, and 45 ms average completion time, outperforming local execution, reactive offloading, and DQN-based offloading. The proposed strategy improves real-time reliability, energy efficiency, and robustness in highly dynamic edge computing environments.
A task-driven offloading algorithm based on Balanced Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (BMADDPG) that reduces average task processing latency by approximately 22.67% and decreases total system cost by at least 18.32% under high-load scenarios.
This paper addresses the joint task offloading and resource allocation problem in multi-user MEC systems and proposes a decentralized control framework based on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), which achieves lower total system cost and faster convergence than the full-local, full-offload, and heuristic baselines.
A new paradigm for satisfying the ever-growing demands of real-time Sixth Generation (6G) applications is Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). Additionally, base stations and Internet of Things devices that incorporate renewable energy harvesting capabilities have the potential to lower grid energy use. To maximize system potential and lower carbon emissions, it is crucial to make effective decisions about job offloading and resource allocation. A carbon-aware MEC architecture that uses both grid and renewable energy sources is proposed in this paper. Our goal is to jointly manage resource allocation and task offloading while monitoring carbon emissions and task queue delays to optimize system behavior under uncertainty, specifically for stochastic workloads and variable renewable generation. To balance these two cost components (emissions and queue length), we create a combined optimization problem. We develop a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based joint optimization technique to address this issue in a constantly changing environment. In the optimization, we consider greedy policy (GP) and full offloading (FO), as well as time-average carbon emission (TACE) and time-average queue length (TAQL) as performance metrics, and time-average queue length (TAQL) and full execution (FE) as baseline strategies; we also evaluate normalized time-average cumulative reward (NTACR). This method uses continuous-action reinforcement learning to generate efficient, real-time control policies. For the proposed MEC network, numerical statistics show that our approach can lead to effective offloading and lower carbon emissions.