RL-based mobile edge computing scheme for high reliability low latency services in UAV-aided IIoT networks

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The prevailing adoption of Internet of Things paradigm is giving rise to a wide range of use cases in various vertical industries including remote health, industrial automation, and smart agriculture. However, the realization of such use cases is mainly challenged due to their stringent service requirements of high reliability and low latency. This challenge grows further when the service entails processing collected data for informed decision making. In this work, we consider a field of industrial Internet of Things devices that generate computational tasks and are covered by a nearby base station equipped with an edge server. The edge server offers fast processing to the devices’ tasks to help in meeting their latency requirement. Due to statistical wireless variability, the task data may not be correctly delivered in time for processing. To this end, we utilize an unmanned aerial vehicle as a supplemental edge server that tailors its trajectory and flies closer to the IIoT devices to ensure a highly reliable task delivery based on the given task reliability constraints. We formulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process, and propose a deep reinforcement learning-based approach using proximal policy optimization to optimize the unmanned aerial vehicle trajectory and scheduling devices to offload their data for processing. We present simulation results for various system scenarios to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution as compared to several baseline approaches.