Decision Transformer-Based Efficient Data Offloading in LEO-IoT

Abstract

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed rapid development. However, the scarcity of computing resources on the ground has constrained the application scenarios of IoT. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites have drawn people’s attention due to their broader coverage and shorter transmission delay. They are capable of offloading more IoT computing tasks to mobile edge computing (MEC) servers with lower latency in order to address the issue of scarce computing resources on the ground. Nevertheless, it is highly challenging to share bandwidth and power resources among multiple IoT devices and LEO satellites. In this paper, we explore the efficient data offloading mechanism in the LEO satellite-based IoT (LEO-IoT), where LEO satellites forward data from the terrestrial to the MEC servers. Specifically, by optimally selecting the forwarding LEO satellite for each IoT task and allocating communication resources, we aim to minimize the data offloading latency and energy consumption. Particularly, we employ the state-of-the-art Decision Transformer (DT) to solve this optimization problem. We initially obtain a pre-trained DT through training on a specific task. Subsequently, the pre-trained DT is fine-tuned by acquiring a small quantity of data under the new task, enabling it to converge rapidly, with less training time and superior performance. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that in contrast to the classical reinforcement learning approach (Proximal Policy Optimization), the convergence speed of DT can be increased by up to three times, and the performance can be improved by up to 30%.