Topology-Aware GNN-DQN for Optimal Task Offloading in Edge–Fog–Cloud Systems

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has grown rapidly in recent years, enabling the interconnection of a large number of heterogeneous and distributed devices. This number is expected to exceed 70 billion according to Statista. With this massive scale, fulfilling complex IoT applications that require combinations of multiple objects remains a real challenge. Moreover, several Quality of Service (QoS) requirements must be satisfied, making the problem of selecting appropriate IoT services NP-hard. In such environments, task offloading is a key mechanism to efficiently distribute computational workloads across edge, fog, and cloud resources. However, selecting the optimal offloading decision remains a difficult NP-hard problem due to system heterogeneity and conflicting objectives. In this paper, we propose a GNN-DQN-based approach for task offloading in edge–fog–cloud environments. Unlike prior GNN-DQN approaches limited to single- or dual-tier architectures, our framework explicitly models heterogeneous node types and inter-tier communication links, enabling more balanced and scalable resource allocation. Experimental results show that GNN-DQN achieves a mean latency of 2.64 s, representing improvements of 70.2% over Random, 7.8% over DQN-only, and 3.5% over Greedy. A GNN-A2C baseline is also included to broaden the comparison with a modern DRL method. Despite sharing the same GNN encoder, it underperforms GNN-DQN across all metrics, confirming the superiority of the DQN learning backbone. These results highlight the effectiveness of integrating graph-based representation with reinforcement learning, while also revealing a trade-off between latency optimization and energy efficiency.