Efficient UAV/Satellite-assisted IoT Task Offloading: A Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Solution

In the future mobile edge networks, the Internet of things (IoT) applications will be latency-sensitive and computationally intensive. Given the resource limitation of IoT devices, mobile edge computing (MEC) servers are critical to support the efficient processing of IoT tasks. Since MEC servers attached to the ground base stations are generally deployed in fixed locations and vulnerable to physical damage, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and satellite-assisted MEC framework has been proposed to leverage the flexibility of UAVs and the broad coverage of satellites. However, efficient utilization of the UAV/satellite resources is challenging for the static ground IoT devices because of the dynamic in terms of aerial and space network topology and IoT task arrival rates. To adapt to the changing environment and utilize the interaction among multiple UAVs, we propose a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) framework to jointly optimize the traveling routes of multi-UAVs and the offloading decision of IoT devices. To minimize the processing cost in terms of task processing latency and energy consumption of IoT devices, cooperative UAVs can help find the optimal task offloading location for each IoT device. Simulation results show the proposed algorithm based on MADDPG can averagely decrease 20% of the above processing cost compared with the benchmark approach.