A Load-Aware Task Offloading Method for Mobile Edge Computing Under Eligibility Constraints

Mobile edge computing (MEC) enables computation-intensive and latency-sensitive tasks to be offloaded from mobile devices to nearby edge servers. Most existing MEC task offloading studies formulate offloading as a selection problem over a fixed or fully available set of candidate servers, which is restrictive in heterogeneous MEC scenarios with task-node eligibility constraints. Under such constraints, a task can be processed by an edge server only when task attributes, service requirements, link conditions, and node states jointly satisfy the corresponding eligibility conditions. The feasible action set therefore varies over time, while offloading decisions are further coupled with edge-node-side queue competition and long-term load evolution. To address this problem, this paper proposes Resource-oriented Scheduling Coordination (RoSCo), a load-aware task offloading method with scheduling-level constraint handling for eligibility-constrained MEC systems. In this paper, scheduling coordination refers to the joint use of feasible-action control, priority-aware edge-node service-order modeling, and load-responsive feedback within the task offloading decision process; it does not denote inter-server communication, task aggregation, federated model aggregation, or a distributed coordination protocol. RoSCo constructs a dynamic feasible action set, applies eligibility-aware action masking to exclude infeasible offloading actions, incorporates priority-aware edge-node service-order information to characterize queueing competition among heterogeneous tasks, and designs a load-responsive reward to guide congestion mitigation and load balancing. A dueling double deep Q-network (D3QN) is adopted as the value-learning backbone, while the main methodological contribution lies in embedding task-specific feasible-action control, priority-aware node-side queue information, and load-responsive feedback into the constrained offloading process. Simulation results show that RoSCo reduces the task drop rate and edge-node load imbalance while maintaining competitive task completion delay and energy consumption, especially under high-load and sparse-eligibility conditions.