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Online Service Migration in Mobile Edge with Incomplete System Information: A Deep Recurrent Actor-Critic Learning Approach

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

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  • Jin Wang
  • Jia Hu
  • Geyong Min
  • Qiang Ni
  • Tarek El-Ghazawi
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Article number11
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/11/2023
<mark>Journal</mark>IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Issue number11
Volume22
Number of pages13
Pages (from-to)6663-6675
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date9/08/22
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging computing paradigm that extends cloud computing to the network edge to support resource-intensive applications on mobile devices. As a crucial problem in MEC, service migration needs to decide how to migrate user services for maintaining the Quality-of-Service when users roam between MEC servers with limited coverage and capacity. However, finding an optimal migration policy is intractable due to the dynamic MEC environment and user mobility. Many existing studies make centralized migration decisions based on complete system-level information, which is time-consuming and also lacks desirable scalability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel learning-driven method, which is user-centric and can make effective online migration decisions by utilizing incomplete system-level information. Specifically, the service migration problem is modeled as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). To solve the POMDP, we design a new encoder network that combines a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and an embedding matrix for effective extraction of hidden information, and further propose a tailored off-policy actor-critic algorithm for efficient training. The extensive experimental results based on real-world mobility traces demonstrate that this new method consistently outperforms both the heuristic and state-of-the-art learning-driven algorithms and can achieve near-optimal results on various MEC scenarios.

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©2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.