Deep reinforcement learning for dynamic computation offloading and resource allocation in cache-assisted mobile edge computing systems

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is one of the most promising techniques for next-generation wireless communication systems. In this paper, we study the problem of dynamic caching, computation offloading, and resource allocation in cache-assisted multi-user MEC systems with stochastic task arrivals. There are multiple computationally intensive tasks in the system, and each Mobile User (MU) needs to execute a task either locally or remotely in one or more MEC servers by offloading the task data. Popular tasks can be cached in MEC servers to avoid duplicates in offloading. The cached contents can be either obtained through user offloading, fetched from a remote cloud, or fetched from another MEC server. The objective is to minimize the long-term average of a cost function, which is defined as a weighted sum of energy consumption, delay, and cache contents’ fetching costs. The weighting coefficients associated with the different metrics in the objective function can be adjusted to balance the tradeoff among them. The optimum design is performed with respect to four decision parameters: whether to cache a given task, whether to offload a given uncached task, how much transmission power should be used during offloading, and how much MEC resources to be allocated for executing a task. We propose to solve the problems by developing a dynamic scheduling policy based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) with the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) method. A new decentralized DDPG algorithm is developed to obtain the optimum designs for multi-cell MEC systems by leveraging on the cooperations among neighboring MEC servers. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other existing strategies, such as Deep Q-Network (DQN).