Mobility-Aware and Privacy-Preserving Federated Reinforcement Learning with Multi-Paradigm Machine Learning for Edge Intelligence in 5G/6G Networks

Abstract

The rise of 5G and 6G networks, along with the rapid growth of edge computing, is creating a strong need for smarter and more privacy-aware ways to handle task offloading as users move across the network. Many current methods still treat mobility prediction, federated learning (FL), and differential privacy (DP) as separate pieces, which often leads to avoidable delays, higher energy use, and weaker data protection. This paper introduces Mobility-Aware Federated Reinforcement Learning (MA-FRL), a framework designed to bring these components together. It integrates deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with supervised and unsupervised ML techniques to enhance edge intelligence, mobility prediction using Markov chains, and Gaussian Differential Privacy (DP) to make better offloading decisions across multi-tier edge environments. MA-FRL uses a federated deep Q-network (DQN), where each edge node trains locally on mobility-aware data and adds DP noise before contributing to the global model. It utilizes NS-3 and م, in addition to real datasets like CRAWDAD, GeoLife, and SPEC power; the framework is among the first to achieve 32% lower latency, 27% energy savings, and strong privacy protection (ε < 1.0). Pareto analysis shows a balance between performance goals and topology-aware tuning, improving results in urban, rural, and vehicular settings. MA-FRL also aligns with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Future work will explore Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (ST-GNN) mobility models and hardware-in-the-loop testing.