Joint Offloading and Resource Allocation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computation offloading (MECO) has recently emerged as a promising method to support computation-intensive and latency-sensitive applications, significantly saving the battery energy of smart mobile devices (SMDs). However, on the one hand, the energy consumption depends on both the SMD and the MEC server, which makes it necessary to consider these two entities to achieve energy sustainability jointly. On the other hand, for a real-time mobile edge computing (MEC) system, efficient optimization algorithms based on binary offloading have received significant attention, while efficient algorithms for partial offloading under time-varying channels are seldom investigated. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning to optimize the overall energy cost in a real-time multi-user MEC system. We decompose the energy minimization problem into two sub-problems, where a deep neural network learns the optimal mapping between wireless channels and offloading ratios, and a closed-form solution for the optimal local frequency and a convex optimization algorithm are used to solve the resource allocation sub-problem. Finally, the extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in reducing the total energy consumption of the MECO system against several offloading schemes and achieving low processing latency fit to the time-varying wireless channels.