In this paper, we consider a hybrid mobile edge computing (H-MEC) platform, which includes ground stations (GSs), ground vehicles (GVs) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs), all with mobile edge cloud installed to enable user equipments (UEs) or Internet of thing (IoT) devices with intensive computing tasks to offload. Our objective is to obtain an online offloading algorithm to minimize the energy consumption of all the UEs, by jointly optimizing the positions of GVs and UAVs, user association and resource allocation in real-time, while considering the dynamic environment. To this end, we propose a hybrid deep learning based online offloading (H2O) framework where a large-scale path-loss fuzzy c-means (LSFCM) algorithm is first proposed and used to predict the optimal positions of GVs and UAVs. Secondly, a fuzzy membership matrix U-based particle swarm optimization (U-PSO) algorithm is applied to solve the mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems and generate the sample datasets for the deep neural network (DNN) where the fuzzy membership matrix can capture the small-scale fading effects and the information of mutual interference. Thirdly, a DNN with the scheduling layer is introduced to provide user association and computing resource allocation under the practical latency requirement of the tasks and limited available computing resource of H-MEC. In addition, different from traditional DNN predictor, we only input one UEs information to the DNN at one time, which will be suitable for the scenarios where the number of UE is varying and avoid the curse of dimensionality in DNN.
An online resource scheduling framework is proposed for minimizing the sum of weighted task latency for all the mobile users, by optimizing offloading decision, transmission power, and resource allocation in the mobile edge computing (MEC) system. Towards this end, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method is proposed to obtain an online resource scheduling policy. Firstly, a related and regularized stacked auto encoder (2r-SAE) with unsupervised learning is proposed to perform data compression and representation for high dimensional channel quality information (CQI) data, which can reduce the state space for DRL. Secondly, we present an adaptive simulated annealing based approach (ASA) as the action search method of DRL, in which an adaptive h-mutation is used to guide the search direction and an adaptive iteration is proposed to enhance the search efficiency during the DRL process. Thirdly, a preserved and prioritized experience replay (2p-ER) is introduced to assist the DRL to train the policy network and find the optimal offloading policy. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance while significantly decreasing the computational time compared with existing benchmarks. It also shows that the proposed framework is suitable for resource scheduling problem in large-scale MEC networks, especially in the dynamic environment.Index Terms-Stacked auto encoder, deep reinforcement learning, adaptive simulated annealing, mobile edge computing.
By taking full advantage of Computing, Communication and Caching (3C) resources at the network edge, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is envisioned as one of the key enablers for the next generation networks. However, current fixed-location MEC architecture may not be able to make realtime decision in dynamic environment, especially in large-scale scenarios. To address this issue, in this paper, a Heterogeneous MEC (H-MEC) architecture is proposed, which is composed of fixed unit, i.e., Ground Stations (GSs) as well as moving nodes, i.e., Ground Vehicles (GVs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), all with 3C resource enabled. The key challenges in H-MEC, i.e., mobile edge node management, real-time decision making, user association and resource allocation along with the possible Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions are discussed. In addition, the AI-based joint Resource schEduling (ARE) framework with two different AI-based mechanisms, i.e., Deep neural network (DNN)-based and deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based architectures are proposed. DNN-based solution with online incremental learning applies the global optimizer and therefore has better performance than the DRL-based architecture with online policy updating, but requires longer training time. The simulation results are given to verify the efficiency of our proposed ARE framework.
In large-scale mobile edge computing (MEC) systems, the task latency and energy consumption are important for massive resource-consuming and delay-sensitive Internet of things devices (IoTDs). Against this background, we propose a distributed intelligent resource scheduling (DIRS) framework to minimize the sum of task latency and energy consumption for all IoTDs, which can be formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming. The DIRS framework includes centralized training relying on the global information and distributed decision making by each agent deployed in each MEC server. Specifically, we first introduce a novel multi-agent ensemble-assisted distributed deep reinforcement learning (DRL) architecture, which can simplify the overall neural network structure of each agent by partitioning the state space and also improve the performance of a single agent by combining decisions of all the agents. Secondly, we apply action refinement to enhance the exploration ability of the proposed DIRS framework, where the near-optimal state-action pairs are obtained by a novel Levy flight search. Finally, an imitation acceleration scheme is presented to pre-train all the agents, which can significantly accelerate the learning process of the proposed framework through learning the professional experience from a small amount of demonstration data. The simulation results in three typical scenarios demonstrate that the proposed DIRS framework is efficient and outperforms the existing benchmark schemes.
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