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MERA: A Green Edge Resource Control System With Privacy-Preservation via Mean-Field Reinforcement Learning

Ziqi Wang Xiaoyu Xia Ibrahim Khalil Tianxu Lan Feng Liu Xiaolong Xu Xun Yi Minhui Xue Elisa Bertino
Sep 2026 · IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering · Vol 38, pp. 5963-5977 · 0 citations · 47 references

Abstract

The global rollout of 5G networks has spurred the rapid deployments of edge servers for hosting latency-sensitive web applications, which improves quality of experience (QoE). However, current efforts fall short in the substantial energy costs associated with the 24/7 operation of edge servers and overlook user privacy by requiring accurate user information for service provision, eroding the sustainability of multi-access edge computing (MEC). To enhance the QoE and service performance while ensuring privacy in MEC, we systematically formulate the interaction among edge servers as a privacy-preserving experience-aware edge resource control (PEERC) problem. To address this, we conduct a global resource control and propose a collaborative resource allocation system named MERA. MERA leverages <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>k</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="xia-ieq1-3705464.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>-anonymity data obfuscation to protect user location and resource demand privacy while enhancing service performance and energy efficiency with mean-field multi-agent reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments based on a synthetic real-world dataset demonstrate that MERA significantly surpasses benchmarks in terms of QoE, user coverage, privacy, and energy efficiency by <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.18\times$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mn>1</mml:mn><mml:mo>.</mml:mo><mml:mn>18</mml:mn><mml:mo>×</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="xia-ieq2-3705464.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>, <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.24\times$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mn>1</mml:mn><mml:mo>.</mml:mo><mml:mn>24</mml:mn><mml:mo>×</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="xia-ieq3-3705464.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>, <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.63\times$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mn>1</mml:mn><mml:mo>.</mml:mo><mml:mn>63</mml:mn><mml:mo>×</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="xia-ieq4-3705464.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>, and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.27\times$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mn>1</mml:mn><mml:mo>.</mml:mo><mml:mn>27</mml:mn><mml:mo>×</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="xia-ieq5-3705464.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> on average.

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