A Task Scheduler for Mobile Edge Computing Using Priority-based Reinforcement Learning

Edge computing offers cloud-like services closer to users and IoT devices, providing high speed and accessibility for network users. Edge computing, often called Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), is a distributed paradigm that utilizes heterogeneous computational and storage resources with well-provisioned capabilities rather than relying on the ample resources of the cloud. In addition, edge users usually refer to portable and mobile devices that connect to and disconnect from the network at will. Therefore, scheduling tasks at the appropriate time and allocating the right resources can be modeled as a multi-objective optimization problem in MEC. Moreover, each task has specific requirements, further adding to the complexity of the optimization problem. In this study, we formulate the scheduling problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to schedule the tasks. The learning time of the task scheduler is minimized when it faces new users and edge servers. Subsequently, we employ the Q-learning (QL) algorithm from the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm to address the optimization problem and effectively adapt the proposed scheduler to the dynamic nature of MEC. Accordingly, we designed the valid state space, action space, and reward function with appropriate conditions and proper rewards for the proposed QL-based technique. We conducted comprehensive experiments to validate the results of the proposed solution, taking into account the inherent randomness of the QL-based technique. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique achieves the lowest learning time compared to Deep learning-based and Deep RL-based approaches. Furthermore, on average, the proposed technique obtains a 72% faster runtime compared to previous works, using 58% fewer computation cycles and 50% less memory. These improvements make the proposed approach an efficient and lightweight task scheduler for MEC.