Mobility-Aware Computation Offloading with Adaptive Load Balancing in Small-Cell MEC

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising computing paradigm enabling mobile devices to offload computation-intensive tasks to nearby edge servers for fast processing. In this paper, we investigate the computing task offloading in small-cell MEC systems. Considering the unevenly distributed mobile users, it is critical to balance the computing load among edge servers to better utilize the computing resources. To this end, we formulate a joint task offloading control and load balancing problem to minimize the average computational cost of users. The formulated problem is a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem and is intractable with system scale. To solve the problem in real time, we propose a reinforcement learning-based grouping and task offloading control (RLGTC) scheme. Specifically, we first decompose the problem into two sub-problems with the Tammer method, i.e., the task offloading control (ToC) and server grouping (SeG) sub-problems. Then, we devise two algorithms based on the Kalman Filter technique and reinforcement learning with Dueling Double DQN to solve them, respectively. Extensive data-driven experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the RLGTC scheme in achieving load balancing and reducing UEs’ computational costs compared to the state-of-the-art benchmarks.