Distributed Task Offloading based on Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the increasing popularity of mobile applications, e.g., virtual reality, unmanned driving, which are generally computation-intensive and latency-sensitive, posing a major challenge for resource-limited user equipment (UE). Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been proposed as a promising approach to alleviate the problem, by offloading mobile tasks to the edge server (ES) deployed in close proximity to UE. However, most existing task offloading algorithms are primarily based on centralized scheduling, which could suffer from the 'curse of dimensionality' in large MEC environments. To address this issue, this paper proposes a fully distributed task offloading approach based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning, whose critic and actor neural networks are trained under the assistance of global and local network states, respectively. In addition, we design a model parameter aggregation mechanism, along with a normalized fine-tuned reward function, to further improve the learning efficiency of the training process. Simulation results show that our proposed approach could achieve substantial performance improvements over baseline approaches.