Energy-Efficient Task Offloading in UAV-Enabled MEC via Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Jiakun Gao, Jie Zhang, Xiaolong Xu, Lianyong Qi, Yuan Yuan, Zheng Li, Wanchun Dou

Abstract: Nowadays, artificial intelligence-based tasks are imposing increasing demands on computation resources and energy consumption. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely utilized in mobile edge computing (MEC) due to maneuverability and integration of MEC servers, providing computation assistance to ground terminals (GTs). The task offloading process from GTs to UAVs in UAV-enabled MEC faces challenges such as workload imbalance among UAVs due to uneven GT distribution and conflicts arising from the increasing number of GTs and limited communication resources. Additionally, the dynamic nature of communication networks and workload needs to be considered. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient based distributed offloading method, named DMARL, treating each GT as an independent decision-maker responsible for determining task offloading strategies and transmission power. Furthermore, a UAV-enabled MEC with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access architecture is introduced, incorporating task computation and transmission queue models. In addition, a differential reward function that considers both system-level rewards and individual rewards for each GT is designed. Simulation experiments conducted in three different scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior performance in balancing latency and energy consumption.