Jul 2026· International journal of Computer Networks & Communications· 0 citations· 19 references
Abstract
The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has placed unprecedented pressure on the network edge, where applications such as augmented reality, real-time analytics, and autonomous navigation demand low latency and tight energy budgets that traditional cloud-centric architectures cannot meet. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) addresses this gap by relocating computation closer to end users, but the core question of where and how each task should be executed remains open: rulebased and single-objective offloading strategies fail to simultaneously balance service latency, energy efficiency, and user experience under dynamic, large-scale conditions. In this paper we propose TARLOT (Two-Agent Reinforcement Learning Offloading Tasks), a cooperative framework for threetier IoT–MEC–Cloud environments. TARLOT decouples the offloading decision from the resourceallocation problem and assigns each to a dedicated Q-learning agent, so that the two subproblems are specialised independently while still being optimised jointly. The framework is evaluated on PureEdgeSim under heterogeneous IoT workloads, device densities ranging from 200 to 2,400, and diverse application profiles, and is compared against five widely-used baselines (Random, Round-Robin, Trade-Off, Pure-Edge, and Pure-Cloud). At 2,400 devices, TARLOT delivers an average service time of 1.1 s (against 4.3 s for Pure-Cloud), a Quality of Experience of 0.77 (against 0.22 for Pure-Cloud), a task-failure rate below 2 % (against nearly 14 % for Pure-Cloud), and a per-device energy consumption of only 3.6 W (against 11.2 W for Pure-Cloud) — roughly a 68 % reduction. Balanced CPU utilisation across the local, edge, and cloud tiers further confirms that TARLOT prevents resource bottlenecks, establishing it as a practical solution for next-generation large-scale IoT deployments.
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.
Youssef Oukissou, Mohamed Amine Meddaoui, Ayoub Belaidi et al.· International journal of Com...· 0 citations
Experimental evaluation on a heterogeneous synthetic benchmark demonstrates that the proposed DDQN scheduler reduces SLA violations by approximately 85% relative to Round Robin and 72% relative to the greedy baseline, while achieving superior energy efficiency.
Vishakha Makode, Taresh Ayaspure· Journal of Advances in Devel...· 0 citations
The internet of things (IoT) has rapidly evolved into a ubiquitous communication paradigm for enabling the deployment of autonomous wireless networks across diverse application domains. However, the limited energy storage capacity and computational resources of IoT devices (IoTDs) pose a serious concern to their long-term sustainability and the expected quality of service delivery. Moreover, in the foreseeable era of the internet of everything, centralised network resource management is likely to constrain network scalability. To tackle these challenges in the current and next-generation communication networks, the adoption of adaptive and lightweight computational frameworks coupled with energy-efficient transmission strategies is essential. To demonstrate this, we exploit the concept of cooperative communication and radio frequency-based energy-harvesting to improve the network throughput while maintaining power supply to the IoTDs. Furthermore, to intelligently and autonomously perform resource allocation, we employ the reinforcement learning frameworks, particularly state–action–reward–state–action (SARSA) and Q-learning. Based on key performance evaluation metrics, we compare our findings with the baseline methods, including the equal, random, and greedy power level selection schemes, with SARSA exhibiting the most favourable performance trade-offs.
Olumide Alamu, T. Olwal, Emmanuel M. Migabo· Network· 0 citations
Battery life remains a major constraint on the continuous operation of mobile IoT devices represented by drones. Most existing computation offloading strategies rely on static heuristic rules, which fail to deliver stable performance in dynamically changing wireless mobile environments. Targeting this problem, this paper develops a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning approach for Spark job scheduling across local devices, edge servers and cloud resources. The scheduling task is modeled as a Markov decision process: six real-time system and network metrics, including CPU utilization, memory load, handover delay, signal strength, transmission latency and congestion level, form the state space, and the reward function is built directly on actual measured energy consumption data. Based on the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) algorithm, the proposed method adopts a centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm to realize distributed collaborative decision-making. Validation on a public MEC dataset shows that the trained policy finally converges to a hybrid scheduling mode: 57% of tasks are processed locally, 39% are offloaded to edge nodes, and less than 4% are assigned to cloud resources for specific application scenarios. Comparative tests with PPO, FIFO, FAIR and HAS baselines confirm that multi-agent reinforcement learning can well capture the intrinsic scheduling patterns of complex mobile environments, providing an adaptive and energy-efficient scheduling solution for practical IoT deployments.
Haoyu Gu· Scientific Journal of Intell...· 0 citations
A constraint-aware multi-agent edge collaborative offloading algorithm (CARE-CTDE) that achieves better scheduling performance, resource utilization, and constraint satisfaction than baseline methods in dynamic heterogeneous MEC scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness for constrained edge computing systems.
Yuxuan Yang, Hexing Wang, Yang Zhou· Mathematics· 0 citations
A constrained optimization model that supports different management goals through alternative objective functions (latency-aware or power-aware) while enforcing operational constraints, including node capacities, slice-specific latency bounds, and explicit limits on VNF migrations/relocations between scheduling periods is proposed.
R. Moreno-Vozmediano, E. Huedo, R. Montero et al.· Journal of Network and Syste...· 0 citations