Cell-Less Offloading of Distributed Learning Tasks in Multi-Access Edge Computing

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a powerful technology that facilitates the provision of services to 6G users with ultra-low latency and high reliability, particularly in supporting artificial intelligence (AI) applications that rely on distributed machine learning (DL). However, the mobility of users poses challenges in offloading DL tasks to the MEC networks while ensuring satisfactory delay and blocking rates. Task replication emerges as a promising technique for achieving a cell-less design for mobile users. Nevertheless, existing research overlooks the replication of DL tasks involving multiple subtasks and users, as well as the high resource cost of task replication. Towards this challenge, this paper investigates the Mobility-awarE mulTi-replicA (META) DL task offloading problem in MEC networks. First, we propose a hybrid resource allocation mechanism that allocates resources to a replica with high access probability in a static manner and dynamically allocates resources to replicas with low access probabilities. Then, we develop an access base station (BS) clustering algorithm for each user to determine the optimal number of replicas. Additionally, we propose the META DL task offloading algorithms with proved approximation ratios to minimize the overall resource cost. Through simulations based on generated and real-world mobile users, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.