Online Joint Scheduling of Delay-Sensitive and Computation-Oriented Tasks in Edge Computing

In the context of Edge Computing (EC) and Internet of Things (IoT), numerous tasks are offloaded from mobile users and sensor devices to edge nodes for further processing to reduce delay and solve the problem of insufficient local computation resources. These tasks can be mainly divided into delay-sensitive and computation-oriented tasks. The former tasks depend on the service provided by the container, while the latter tasks are submitted as a batch with task dependencies. Considering the heterogeneity of edge nodes, joint task scheduling can effectively improve resource utilization. However, relatively few researches consider the different characteristics of tasks like container constraints and task dependencies in joint task scheduling in EC. In order to fill in this gap, we propose a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) based online joint task scheduling (OJTS) algorithm. Specifically, 1) We first model the problem of joint scheduling of delay-sensitive and computation-oriented tasks in resource-constrained EC scenario with the goals of maximizing system utility and minimizing system cost (weighted sum of the number and duration of unfinished tasks). 2) Then, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm to solve the above problem and make appropriate adjustments to the original network structure according to the scheduling decision. 3) Through validation on real-world trace, OJTS can improve the system utility by 26.0% and overall reward by 51.2% compared with baselines and meet real-time decision-making requirements.