Advanced Energy-Efficient Computation Offloading Using Deep Reinforcement Learning in MTC Edge Computing

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) supports the internet of things (IoT) by leveraging computation offloading. It minimizes the delay and consequently reduces the energy consumption of the IoT devices. However, the consideration of static communication mode in most of the recent work, despite varying network dynamics and resource diversity, is the main limitation. An energy-efficient computation offloading method using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is proposed. Both delay-tolerant and non-delay tolerant scenarios are considered using capillary machine type communication (MTC). Depending upon the type of service, an intelligent MTC edge server using DRL decides either process the incoming request at the MTC edge server or sends it to the cloud server. To control communication, we draft a markov decision problem (MDP). This minimizes the long-term power consumption of the system. The formulation of the optimization problem is considered under the constraint of computing power resources and delays. Simulation results delineate the significant performance gain of 12% in computation offloading through the proposed DRL approach. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model are compared with other baselines and are demonstrated numerically.