Adaptive Search and Collaborative Offloading Under Device-to-Device Joint Edge Computing Network

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Device-to-Device (D2D) peer offloading are two promising paradigms in the mobile Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we study the collaborative task offloading with redundant data and codes in large-scale IoT networks, where computing resource-starved IoT devices can offload their tasks to MEC servers via cellular links or to nearby peer devices (PDs) with idle resources through D2D links for execution. IoT tasks usually consist of a series of dependent and parallel subtasks, and the difficulties in current research are (i) how to eliminate redundancy in data or codes between subtasks, and (ii) how to leverage previous experience to adaptively search a set of collaborative MEC servers and PDs for matching offloading of dependent and parallel subtasks. From this, we propose a redundancy-aware adaptive search offloading (RASO) method based on the deep Q-network (DQN). Specifically, we first design a fine-grained task recombination scheme by judging the consistency of subtask data and codes. After that, we organize the global devices into a spatial index MP-tree to reduce the search solution space, and propose a fast adaptive search method based on the DQN combined with MP-tree, where optimal path-guiding parameters training of inner and outer layers is involved to efficiently help achieve collaborative devices to complete specific tasks with the same type. After finding the collaborative MEC servers and PDs along MP-tree for a certain task, a centralized stable matching algorithm is further developed to give a decision of offloading each of its divided dependent and parallel subtasks to the matched one, thereby optimizing offloading delay and energy consumption. Extensive simulation results show that compared to other counterpart solutions, our proposed method has improved task offloading performance in terms of delay and energy consumption.