Integrated Resource Collaboration for RIS-Assisted Digital-Twin-Empowered Internet of Everything

In the Internet of Everything (IoE) era, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) and mobile edge computing (MEC) have emerged as crucial enabling technologies to support delay-sensitive and computation-intensive IoE services. Despite the potentials of RISs and MEC, achieving efficient service provisioning in IoE scenarios still faces significant challenges due to interdependencies among different types of resources. To address this issue, we propose a digital twin (DT)-empowered IoE framework that leverages real-time monitoring to virtually replicate network conditions, thereby assisting in decision-making in a physical IoE scenario. Specifically, the IoE scenario comprises a MEC server empowered by pre-storing some service programs for task execution and a RIS that assists computation offloading. Taking into account deviations between DT and physical networks, we aim to minimize devices’ total task completion delay by jointly optimizing the service caching at the MEC server, the computation offloading of devices, the computing resource allocation at the MEC server, and the beamforming of the RIS. To handle the problem involving discrete and continuous factors, we develop a hybrid deep reinforcement learning (HDRL) algorithm that integrates the double deep Q-network (DDQN) and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) approaches. In our HDRL algorithm, DDQN plays a crucial role in determining discrete variables representing service caching and computation offloading decisions, while DDPG focuses on optimizing resource allocation and RIS beamforming. We conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme and compare it with several baselines. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme in minimizing the task completion delay.