Resource Allocation With Edge Computing in IoT Networks via Machine Learning

In this article, we investigate resource allocation with edge computing in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks via machine learning approaches. Edge computing is playing a promising role in IoT networks by providing computing capabilities close to users. However, the massive number of users in IoT networks requires sufficient spectrum resource to transmit their computation tasks to an edge server, while the IoT users were developed to have more powerful computation ability recently, which makes it possible for them to execute some tasks locally. Then, the design of computation task offloading policies for such IoT edge computing systems remains challenging. In this article, centralized user clustering is explored to group the IoT users into different clusters according to users' priorities. The cluster with the highest priority is assigned to offload computation tasks and executed at the edge server, while the lowest priority cluster executes computation tasks locally. For the other clusters, the design of distributed task offloading policies for the IoT users is modeled by a Markov decision process, where each IoT user is considered as an agent which makes a series of decisions on task offloading by minimizing the system cost based on the environment dynamics. To deal with the curse of high dimensionality, we use a deep Q-network to learn the optimal policy in which deep neural network is used to approximate the Q-function in Q-learning. Simulations show that users are grouped into clusters with optimal number of clusters. Moreover, our proposed computation offloading algorithm outperforms the other baseline schemes under the same system costs.