How to Design Reinforcement Learning Methods for the Edge: An Integrated Approach toward Intelligent Decision Making

Abstract

Extensive research has been carried out on reinforcement learning methods. The core idea of reinforcement learning is to learn methods by means of trial and error, and it has been successfully applied to robotics, autonomous driving, gaming, healthcare, resource management, and other fields. However, when building reinforcement learning solutions at the edge, not only are there the challenges of data-hungry and insufficient computational resources but also there is the difficulty of a single reinforcement learning method to meet the requirements of the model in terms of efficiency, generalization, robustness, and so on. These solutions rely on expert knowledge for the design of edge-side integrated reinforcement learning methods, and they lack high-level system architecture design to support their wider generalization and application. Therefore, in this paper, instead of surveying reinforcement learning systems, we survey the most commonly used options for each part of the architecture from the point of view of integrated application. We present the characteristics of traditional reinforcement learning in several aspects and design a corresponding integration framework based on them. In this process, we show a complete primer on the design of reinforcement learning architectures while also demonstrating the flexibility of the various parts of the architecture to be adapted to the characteristics of different edge tasks. Overall, reinforcement learning has become an important tool in intelligent decision making, but it still faces many challenges in the practical application in edge computing. The aim of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners with a new, integrated perspective to better understand and apply reinforcement learning in edge decision-making tasks.