DRL based Data Offloading for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Mobile Edge Computing
Xuhui Zhang, Yanyan Shen, Bo Yang, Weilin Zang, Shuqiang Wang
Abstract
Recently, the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an emerging and promising technology for achieving higher spectrum and energy efficiency in wireless communication systems. In this paper, we consider a wireless powered mobile edge computing (MEC) network that is equipped with an IRS. The IRS is able to provide a reflecting channel to enhance the offloading capability for edge users. Based on this system model, we investigate an optimisation problem to maximize the sum of users' utilities, which jointly consider the energy efficiency, time latency, and price of offloading computations. With task offloading, power limited users can complete the computational tasks even when they face data-intensive workloads. However, in a dynamic system, it is complicated to design the optimal offloading decision strategy. To tackle this problem, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based approach. In the designed algorithm, in order to get a better reward, the agent chooses a near optimal solution to adjust the workload partitions, the time allocation, and IRS parameters according to the dynamic channel environment and the random arrival of task workload. Numerical results show that the proposed DRL based IRS-aided offloading algorithm can achieve better system performance compared with that without IRS and the relative benchmark algorithms.