Dependent Task Offloading for Multiple Jobs in Edge Computing

Abstract

The dependent task offloading problem for one single job in edge computing (EC) has drawn attention widely. Unlike most existing approaches that only focus on a single job, we aim to solve the dependent task offloading problem for multiple jobs, which is more general in the real world. To solve this problem, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based multi-job dependent task offloading algorithm. Specifically, 1) we model edge nodes, jobs, and tasks in a resource-limited EC scenario, where the dependent tasks of multiple jobs are offloaded to the nodes to be processed. Then we model the task offloading decision as a Markov decision process (MDP) problem to minimize the transmission cost and computation cost. 2) To represent the state space of MDP and to accelerate decision-making in EC, we propose a DRL-based algorithm with the aid of graph convolutional network (GCN) to extract the dependency information of different tasks and then improve the action selection process. 3) We conduct experiments with real-world trace, demonstrating our algorithm outperforms the baseline algorithms 13.78% on average in regarding to offloading cost.