A deep reinforcement learning based hybrid algorithm for efficient resource scheduling in edge computing environment

Abstract

Edge computing can greatly decrease the delay between users and cloud servers, which can significantly improve system service performance. However, it remains challenging for more efficient scheduling and allocation of users’ application demands with dependence constraints to edge cloud servers. Due to the randomness of the initial population, traditional intelligent optimization algorithms have poor convergence speed in addressing resource scheduling. Therefore, to minimize the execution time of the application, this paper proposes a hybrid algorithm to solve the resource scheduling problem with parallelism and subtask dependency. To improve the convergence speed of the algorithm, this paper makes full use of the features of deep Q networks (DQN) and genetic algorithms (GA). The initial population of GA is generated using DQN. Finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, this paper selects three real scientific workflows for experiments. The experimental results show that the hybrid algorithm can converge quickly and improve the optimization effect in a short time.