FEDORA: Federated Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for DAG-Based Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in MEC

The increasing demand for compute intensive Internet of Thing (IoT) applications has accelerated the adoption of multi-access edge Computing (MEC) to offload tasks from resource constrained devices to edge servers. However, making optimal offloading decisions in multi-user MEC environments is challenging due to the dependencies between tasks, resource constraints, and the need to preserve user privacy. In this work, we propose FEDORA, a federated ensemble reinforcement learning framework for directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based task Offloading and resource allocation in MEC environments, that integrates twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) for continuous resource allocation and multi-head deep Q-networks (DQN) for discrete offloading decisions. To handle task dependencies, we model applications as DAGs and generate feature embeddings for offloading decisions. Our federated learning (FL) approach uses local training at MEC level and periodic model aggregation at a global server to preserve data privacy. Finally, extensive simulations across different DAG topologies demonstrate that FEDORA reduces system costs and improves task completion rates compared to state-of-the-art baselines including FL-DQN, FL-DDPG, FedAvg, FedNova, and SCAFFOLD, highlighting its scalability and robustness in large scale MEC deployments.