Learning-Based Privacy-Aware Offloading for Healthcare IoT With Energy Harvesting

Mobile edge computing helps healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) devices with energy harvesting provide satisfactory quality of experiences for computation intensive applications. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based privacy-aware offloading scheme to help healthcare IoT devices protect both the user location privacy and the usage pattern privacy. More specifically, this scheme enables a healthcare IoT device to choose the offloading rate that improves the computation performance, protects user privacy, and saves the energy of the IoT device without being aware of the privacy leakage, IoT energy consumption, and edge computation model. This scheme uses transfer learning to reduce the random exploration at the initial learning process and applies a Dyna architecture that provides simulated offloading experiences to accelerate the learning process. A post-decision state learning method uses the known channel state model to further improve the offloading performance. We provide the performance bound of this scheme regarding the privacy level, the energy consumption, and the computation latency for three typical healthcare IoT offloading scenarios. Simulation results show that this scheme can reduce the computation latency, save the energy consumption, and improve the privacy level of the healthcare IoT device compared with the benchmark scheme.