A Sensor-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Framework for Joint Data Offloading and Power Control in Edge-Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks supported by mobile edge computing are increasingly required to process heterogeneous sensing data under stringent latency, reliability, and energy constraints. However, most existing task-offloading studies are still formulated for generic user equipment and primarily focus on uplink transmission, which is insufficient for practical sensing systems where sensor nodes continuously upload measurements while simultaneously receiving control commands, model updates, and feedback from the edge. To address this gap, this paper reformulates joint computation offloading and power control as a sensor-aware optimization problem in an edge-assisted wireless sensor network. We propose a three-layer architecture consisting of sensor nodes, access points with lightweight edge servers, and a cloud coordination layer. Each sensing task is characterized by data size, computation density, latency deadline, and sensing priority, while the optimization objective jointly minimizes long-term task delay, communication and computation energy, and packet-loss penalty under transmission power, edge resource, and residual-energy constraints. To solve the resulting mixed discrete–continuous problem, we develop a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework in which each sensor node acts as an autonomous agent and learns offloading and transmission policies with clipped proximal policy optimization, while the cloud layer performs coordinated edge-resource allocation through the alternating direction method of multipliers. In addition to delay and energy, network lifetime and sensing delivery performance are incorporated into the evaluation. Simulation results in a sensor-network monitoring scenario demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently reduces latency, lowers energy consumption, and prolongs network lifetime compared with representative baselines, highlighting its effectiveness and practical potential for intelligent sensing applications that require integrated sensing, communication, and edge computing.