Multi-Agent DRL for Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in Multi-UAV Enabled IoT Edge Network

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) edge network has connected lots of heterogeneous smart devices, thanks to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their groundbreaking emerging applications. Limited computational capacity and energy availability have been major factors hindering the performance of edge user equipment (UE) and IoT devices in IoT edge networks. Besides, the edge base station (BS) with the computation server is allowed massive traffic and is vulnerable to disasters. The UAV is a promising technology that provides aerial base stations (ABSs) to assist the edge network in enhancing the ground network performance, extending network coverage, and offloading computationally intensive tasks from UEs or IoT devices. In this paper, we deploy a clustered multi-UAV to provide computing task offloading and resource allocation services to IoT devices. We propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)-based approach to minimize the overall network computation cost while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) requirements of IoT devices or UEs in the IoT network. We formulate our problem as a natural extension of the Markov decision process (MDP) concerning stochastic game, to minimize the long-term computation cost in terms of energy and delay. We consider the stochastic time-varying UAVs’ channel strength and dynamic resource requests to obtain optimal resource allocation policies and computation offloading in aerial to ground (A2G) network infrastructure. Simulation results show that our proposed MADRL method reduces the average costs by 38.643%, and 55.621% and increases the reward by 58.289% and 85.289% compared with the different single agent DRL and heuristic schemes, respectively.