MOBILE EDGE COMPUTING ORIENTED MULTI-AGENT COOPERATIVE ROUTING ALGORITHM: A DRL-BASED APPROACH

Abstract

In the era of 5G/B5G, computing-intensive, delay-sensitive applications such as virtual reality inevitably bring huge amounts of data to the network. In order to meet the real-time requirements of applications, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) pushes computing resources and data from the centralized cloud to the edge network, providing users with computing offload technology. However, the mismatch between the great computing requirements of computing-intensive tasks and the limited computing power of a single edge server poses a great challenge to computing offload technology. In this paper, a multi-agent cooperation mechanism for MEC and a routing mechanism based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) are proposed. First of all, a multi-agent cooperation mechanism is proposed to realize the cooperative processing of computing-intensive and delay-sensitive applications, and the task unloading decision-making problem based on multi-agent cooperation is studied. Secondly, the cooperative processing of tasks by multi-agents involves data transmission. Considering the real-time requirements of tasks, this paper proposes an intelligent routing mechanism based on DRL to plan the optimal routing path. Finally, the simulation implementation and performance evaluation of the multi-agent cooperation mechanism and routing mechanism for MEC are carried out. The experimental results show that the intelligent routing mechanism based on DRL and graph neural network is superior to the comparison mechanism in terms of network average delay, throughput and maximum link bandwidth utilization. At the same time, the superiority of graph neural network in model generalization is verified on a new network topology National Science Foundation (NSF) Net. The results of route optimization are applied to the multi-agent cooperation mechanism, and the experimental results show that the mechanism is superior to the comparison scheme in terms of task success rate and average task response delay. The combination of these two mechanisms well solves the problem that it is difficult to deal with computing-intensive and delay-sensitive applications in mobile edge computing because of its limited resources.