Joint Data Offloading and Resource Allocation for Multi-Cloud Heterogeneous Mobile Edge Computing Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

In this work, we consider a heterogeneous multi-cloud mobile edge computing (Het-MEC) network, where multiple independent cloud centers (CCs) publish tasks to edge devices (EDs) and MEC servers, and compete for their computing and transmission resources. To minimize the system latency, we propose a distributed scheme for each CC to determine its data offloading and resource allocation strategy independently. Competition among multiple CCs in this distributed scheme is depicted by our designed multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) based algorithm, where each CC is self-motivated to learn the explicit models of other CCs and adjusts their behaviors. Simulation results indicate that multiple clouds are self-organized to take full advantage of computing and transmission resources to minimize their own task latency, while a lower system latency can be achieved compared with the cloud computing and local computing schemes.