PPO2: Location Privacy-Oriented Task Offloading to Edge Computing Using Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Autonomous Transport Systems

AI-empowered 5G/6G networks play a substantial role in taking full advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) to perform complex computing by offloading tasks to edge services deployed in intelligent transport systems. However, offloading behavior has a certain regularity, and the real-time location of users can easily be inferred by attackers who have historical user data during the data transmission process. To address this problem, a privacy-oriented task offloading method that can resist attacks from privacy attackers with prior knowledge is proposed. First, the local computing model, channel model, and privacy loss model are defined and used to quantify evaluation indicators, such those related to privacy, time, and energy. Among them, privacy loss is formalized as the probability of a successful attack by an attacker with prior knowledge. Second, the process of solving an optimal task offloading decision problem is formalized into a Markov decision process (MDP). Finally, the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method PPO2 is proposed to solve the planning problem of task offloading with good generalization and convergence speed, where we focus on the location privacy requirement. Experiments show that our method can handle large-scale task offloading and obtain offloading policies with reduced privacy loss, energy consumption and time delays.