Toward Mobility-Aware Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation in End–Edge–Cloud Orchestrated Computing

Abstract

Mobile devices (MDs) have undergone a booming development, yet are still capacity limited in computation and energy resources and thus could face troubles when serving computation-intensive and delay-sensitive applications. Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has been proposed to accommodate MDs with both satisfactory latency and acceptable resources, by offloading MDs’ tasks to near-deployed edge servers (ESs). Whereas, offloading tasks solely to ESs are difficult to meet distinct requirements of various applications, which leads to the emergence of end–edge–cloud orchestrated computing (EECOC). However, studies on EECOC are still insufficient, most existing of which do not consider MDs’ dynamical movements partly due to the intractability of associating optimal ESs with moving MDs. To address the issue, a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based mobility-aware (MA) EECOC scheduling approach is proposed in this article. With the goal of minimizing maximal task latency, we first formulate and transform the optimization problem into a Markov decision problem (MDP). Then, we enable DRL with elaborately designed reward functions and integrate it with NoisyNet to obtain near-optimal solutions. Furthermore, a MA component based on ConvLSTM is developed to extract MDs’ temporal–spatial distribution features and predict their movements, which are further utilized to facilitate the decision making of computation-offloading and resource-allocation actions. Extensive experimental results indicate the promising performance improvements of our approach against the state-of-the-art approaches in various scenarios.

Topics & Concepts