Decentralized Offloading Strategies Based on Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Access Edge Computing

• Main Authors: Chunyang Hu, Jingchen Li, Haobin Shi, Bin Ning, Qiong Gu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-08-01
• Series: Information
• Subjects: multi-access edge computing; deep reinforcement learning; task offloading
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/12/9/343

Using reinforcement learning technologies to learn offloading strategies for multi-access edge computing systems has been developed by researchers. However, large-scale systems are unsuitable for reinforcement learning, due to their huge state spaces and offloading behaviors. For this reason, this work introduces the centralized training and decentralized execution mechanism, designing a decentralized reinforcement learning model for multi-access edge computing systems. Considering a cloud server and several edge servers, we separate the training and execution in the reinforcement learning model. The execution happens in edge devices of the system, and edge servers need no communication. Conversely, the training process occurs at the cloud device, which causes a lower transmission latency. The developed method uses a deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm to optimize offloading strategies. The simulated experiment shows that our method can learn the offloading strategy for each edge device efficiently.