Deep reinforcement learning-based computation offloading and resource allocation in security-aware mobile edge computing

Owing to the insufficient processing ability of wireless devices (WDs), it is difficult for WDs to process these data within the deadline associated with the quality of service requirements. Offloading computation tasks (workloads) to emerging mobile edge computing servers with small or macro base stations is an effective and feasible solution. However, the offloaded data will be fully exposed and vulnerable to security threats. In this paper, we introduce a wireless communication and computation model of partial computation offloading and resource allocation considering the time-varying channel state, the bandwidth constraint, the stochastic arrival of workloads, and privacy preservation. To simultaneously optimize the computation and execution delays, the power consumption, and the bandwidth resources, we model the optimization problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) to minimize the weighted sum cost of the system. Owing to the difficult problems of lack of priori knowledge and the curse of dimensionality, we propose a decentralized optimization scheme on partial computation offloading and resource allocation based on deep reinforcement learning (DOCRRL). According to the time-varying channel state, the arrival rate of computation workloads, and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, the DOCRRL algorithm can learn the optimal policy for decision-making under stringent latency and risk constraints that prevent the curse of dimensionality from arising owing to the high-dimensional action space and state space. The numerical results reveal that DOCRRL can explore and learn the optimal decision-making policy without priori knowledge; it outperforms four baseline schemes in simulation environments.