TL;DR
It is demonstrated that the proposed IA-SAC based task offloading algorithm effectively reduces the total task processing delay and improves resource utilization.
Vehicular edge computing (VEC), a key enabler for the Internet of Things (IoT) in intelligent transportation, addresses onboard processing constraints through collaborative task offloading among vehicles, facilitating latency-sensitive applications such as autonomous driving. However, developing efficient offloading strategies remains particularly challenging in high-density vehicular networks, where intensive computational demands coexist with severely constrained intervehicle communication ranges due to signal blockage. To handle this, we propose M4O, a mobility-aware task offloading framework supporting multihop, multiuser, and multitask offloading optimization. M4O intelligently integrates vehicle mobility patterns and enables relay-assisted offloading to enhance system effectiveness and robustness. The framework employs a dual-algorithm approach: the advantage actor–critic (A2C) for indivisible tasks and the hybrid proximal policy optimization (H-PPO) for divisible tasks, both optimized to minimize the temporally coupled composite cost of time and resources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based solutions of M4O deliver stable and efficient offloading strategies, outperforming existing benchmarks by significant margins in cost efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zhouym1028/M4O
6G vehicular services, including cooperative perception, augmented reality navigation, and high-definition map updating, need computation support close to moving vehicles. Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is a natural solution, but the offloading decision becomes difficult when wireless channel conditions, vehicle density, and edge server loads vary simultaneously. In this paper, we study joint task offloading and resource allocation in 6G VEC with high- and low-frequency cooperation (HL-FC). We formulate the problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP). Each vehicle decides its offloading ratio, transmission power, server association, and edge CPU request from local observations. To evaluate the proposed policy, we build a lightweight equation-driven Python simulator and compare MAPPO with Local-only, Edge-only, Random, and Greedy policies. Compared with Edge-only, MAPPO reduces the average system cost by 32.15%, 23.51%, and 17.13% under 10, 15, and 20 vehicles, respectively. It also improves the task completion rate by 21.00, 20.49, and 17.65 percentage points. Additional blockage experiments show that HL-FC keeps the policy more robust than high-frequency-only transmission under severe high-frequency blockage. The results reveal that MAPPO delivers better performance when edge resources become congested than in lightly loaded scenarios.
A constraint-aware multi-agent edge collaborative offloading algorithm (CARE-CTDE) that achieves better scheduling performance, resource utilization, and constraint satisfaction than baseline methods in dynamic heterogeneous MEC scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness for constrained edge computing systems.
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) enables computation-intensive perception and decision-making tasks in vehicular networks to be offloaded to nearby edge servers. Existing approaches usually fix the artificial intelligence (AI) inference model, overlooking how model selection jointly affects latency, energy consumption, and service reliability. We propose a hierarchical model selection and control (HMSC) framework based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for MEC-assisted vehicular networks. The framework couples a vehicle-layer MAPPO component that provides a communication interface representation for subchannel assignment and energy accounting with a centralized MEC-layer soft actor-critic (SAC) agent that, under SDN orchestration, adaptively selects lightweight or high-fidelity AI models and allocates computational resources. Accordingly, the core contribution of this paper lies in MEC-side model-aware computation control under an explicitly defined subchannel-contention abstraction, rather than in physical-layer transmit-power optimization. Both layers are guided by a composite objective that integrates normalized end-to-end (E2E) latency, normalized energy consumption, and a deadline-violation penalty. Using a discrete-time simulation framework, HMSC reduces E2E latency compared with static inference and non-hierarchical DRL baselines and sustains a higher deadline satisfaction ratio (DSR) under constrained uplink throughput and varying traffic loads. The learned policy is load-aware, favoring high-fidelity inference under light load and lightweight inference under congestion; a post hoc analysis using YOLOv5-family accuracy reference further quantifies the inference-quality implications of this adaptive selection behavior. These results show that coordinated MEC-side control of AI model selection and computation, under a shared deadline-aware objective, provides a robust latency–energy trade-off for MEC-assisted vehicular networks.
This paper considers priority-aware partial computation offloading in an uplink mobile edge computing (MEC) network. Devices assigned to different groups occupy orthogonal subbands, whereas devices within each group use power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) with successive interference cancellation. Task-input size determines the transmitted and processed workload, while queue backlog and application urgency determine the service weight. The Gaussian multiple-access-channel rate region is convex, but the complete allocation problem is not jointly convex in the adopted variables because the offloaded workload is coupled with reciprocal transmission rate and reciprocal edge-CPU allocation. A structure-exploiting block-coordinate projected-gradient method is developed. It combines exact finite-candidate offloading updates, an exact edge-CPU allocation bounded below by deadline feasibility and above by local-path saturation, and an analytical projected power step with Armijo backtracking. For eight users at 23 dBm, pairwise group-based NOMA reduces the weighted delay–energy cost and device energy by 6.18% and 23.44%, respectively, relative to orthogonal access. Queue-aware weighting reduces upper-backlog-quartile delay by 2.69 ms (95% confidence half-width: 0.78 ms) while increasing lower-quartile delay by 8.34 ms (half-width: 2.07 ms). In a paired 15-iteration ablation, generic projected block-coordinate updates have a cost ratio of 1.0098 (half-width: 0.0086) relative to the structured method. A hybrid deep deterministic policy-gradient policy, evaluated over five training seeds, has an 11.77% higher cost while requiring 0.84% of the median online decision time. Of 432 allocations, 392 satisfy the residual-qualified stopping tests and 40 are explicitly reported as iteration-safeguard terminations.
This paper addresses the joint task offloading and resource allocation problem in multi-user MEC systems and proposes a decentralized control framework based on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), which achieves lower total system cost and faster convergence than the full-local, full-offload, and heuristic baselines.