A meta reinforcement learning-based virtual machine placement algorithm in mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing requires more and more high-performance servers, resulting in increased energy consumption. As an effective means to reduce energy consumption, virtual machine placement (VMP) has been widely studied. In the edge computing environment, as the number of terminal device requests continues to increase, the scale of VMP becomes larger and larger, and existing research algorithms may take a long time to converge. The reason is that as the number of VMs increases, the search space of the policy becomes larger and the agent needs to interact with the environment for a longer time to make the best decision. In addition, existing research methods only consider reducing energy consumption, rarely consider the response latency of virtual machines, and almost ignore the dynamic changes of the edge environment. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a virtual machine placement algorithm based on meta-reinforcement learning, which consists of an inner and outer loop. The inner loop designs a deep reinforcement learning algorithm combined with the order exchange and migration mechanism to generate the best decision, and the outer loop provides meta-strategy parameters for the inner loop based on meta-learning to accelerate the convergence capability of the inner loop, thereby obtaining efficient virtual machine placement decisions quickly from a new environment. Through simulation experiments, we demonstrate that our approach effectively reduces the energy consumption of the edge server and the response latency of VMs at different problem sizes compared to the three baseline algorithms. At the same time, it quickly adapts to the new environment with only a small number of gradient updates.