DRL-Based Service Function Chain Edge-to-Edge and Edge-to-Cloud Joint Offloading in Edge-Cloud Network
Wentao Fan, Fan Yang, P. Wang, Mao Miao, Pengcheng Zhao, Tao Huang
Abstract
In this paper, we study service function chain (SFC) offloading in the edge-cloud network. Two offloading options are available for fully-loaded edge nodes: edge to edge (E2E) offloading and edge to cloud (E2C) offloading. Both E2E offloading and E2C offloading have been optimized in existing research, and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods were adopted to achieve excellent performances. However, DRL-based SFC E2E and E2C joint offloading is still a research gap. In this paper, we propose a DRL-based SFC E2E and E2C joint offloading optimization algorithm for the edge-cloud network to maximize the utilization efficiency of edge resources. Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic policy gradient (TD3) algorithm is applied to the optimization problem. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm has excellent convergence performance and improves the utilization efficiency of edge resources in edge-cloud network scenarios of diverse scales.