Federated deep reinforcement learning-based online task offloading and resource allocation in harsh mobile edge computing environment

In the harsh mobile edge computing (HMEC) environment, there are many dynamic changes such as interference from noise, the impact of extreme environmental conditions, and the mobility of devices. It is a great challenge to the online realtime task offloading scheduling for delay-sensitive applications. However, the dynamic changes in HMEC environment have been ignored in almost all previous studies. Therefore, we propose the federated deep reinforcement learning-based online task offloading and resource allocation (FD-OTR) algorithm to address the task offloading in HMEC. Additionally, the FD-OTR algorithm performs resource allocation for offloaded tasks. The task offloading part of FD-OTR algorithm can be divided into two layers: the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) layer and the federated learning (FL) layer. The online algorithm in the DRL layer can adapt to the dynamic HMEC environment and make real-time task offloading decisions. In the FL layer, federated learning with low communication overhead is used for model aggregation to form a better global model. Resource allocation is done by using a new meta-heuristic algorithm: the Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA). Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the FD-OTR algorithm performs well in HMEC. The convergence speed of FD-OTR is three times faster than the centralized method. Compared to the baseline algorithms, FD-OTR reduces costs by 14.3%, 11.2% and 9.28%, respectively.