A large number of connected sensors and devices in Internet of Things (IoT) can generate large amounts of computing data and increase massive energy consumption. Real-time states monitoring and data processing of IoT nodes are of great significance, but the processing power of IoT devices is limited. Using the emerging mobile edge computing (MEC), IoT devices can offload computing tasks to an MEC server associated with small or macro base stations. Moreover, the use of renewable energy harvesting capabilities in base stations or IoT nodes may reduce energy consumption. As wireless channel conditions vary with time and the arrival rates of renewable energy, computing tasks are stochastic, and data offloading and renewable energy aware for IoT devices under a dynamic and unknown environment are major challenges. In this work, we design a data offloading and renewable energy aware model considering an MEC server performing multiple stochastic computing tasks and involving time-varied wireless channels. To optimize data transmission delay, energy consumption, and bandwidth allocation jointly, and to avoid the curse of dimensionality caused by the complexity of the action space, we propose a joint optimization method for data offloading, renewable energy aware, and bandwidth allocation for IoT devices based on deep reinforcement learning (JODRBRL), which can handle the continuous action space. JODRBRL can minimize the total system cost(including data buffer delay cost, energy consumption cost, and bandwidth cost) and obtain an efficient solution by adaptively learning from the dynamic IoT environment. The numerical results demonstrate that JODRBRL can effectively learn the optimal policy, which outperforms Dueling DQN, Double DQN (DDQN), and greedy policy in stochastic environments. INDEX TERMS Data offloading, energy aware, mobile edge computing, deep reinforcement learning.
Users in heterogeneous wireless networks may generate massive amounts of data that are delay-sensitive or require computation-intensive processing. Owing to computation ability and battery capacity limitations, wireless users (WUs) cannot easily process such data in a timely manner, and mobile edge computing (MEC) is increasingly being used to resolve this issue. Specifically, data generated by WUs can be offloaded to the MEC server for processing, which has greater computing power than WUs. However, as the location of MEC servers is fixed, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been considered a promising solution in heterogeneous wireless networks. In this study, we design an UAVassisted computation offloading scheme in an MEC framework with renewable power supply. The proposed model considers the instability of energy arrival, stochastic computation tasks generated by WUs, and a time-varying channel state. Owing to the complexity of the state, it is difficult to use traditional Markov decision process (MDP) with complete prior knowledge for offloading optimization. Accordingly, we propose UAV-assisted computation offloading for MEC based on deep reinforcement learning (UACODRL) to minimize the total cost, which is the weighted sum of the delay, energy consumption, and bandwidth cost. We first use the K-Means algorithm for classification to reduce the dimension of the action space. Subsequently, we use UACODRL to find the near-optimal offloading scheme to minimize the total cost. Simulations demonstrate that UACODRL converges satisfactorily and performs better than four baseline schemes with different parameter configurations.
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