A Meta Reinforcement Learning-Based Task Offloading Strategy for IoT Devices in an Edge Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

Developing an effective task offloading strategy has been a focus of research to improve the task processing speed of IoT devices in recent years. Some of the reinforcement learning-based policies can improve the dependence of heuristic algorithms on models through continuous interactive exploration of the edge environment; however, when the environment changes, such reinforcement learning algorithms cannot adapt to the environment and need to spend time on retraining. This paper proposes an adaptive task offloading strategy based on meta reinforcement learning with task latency and device energy consumption as optimization targets to overcome this challenge. An edge system model with a wireless charging module is developed to improve the ability of IoT devices to provide service constantly. A Seq2Seq-based neural network is built as a task strategy network to solve the problem of difficult network training due to different dimensions of task sequences. A first-order approximation method is proposed to accelerate the calculation of the Seq2Seq network meta-strategy training, which involves quadratic gradients. The experimental results show that, compared with existing methods, the algorithm in this paper has better performance in different tasks and network environments, can effectively reduce the task processing delay and device energy consumption, and can quickly adapt to new environments.