Associative tasks computing offloading scheme in Internet of medical things with deep reinforcement learning

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is regarded as a critical technology for intelligent healthcare in the foreseeable 6G era. Nevertheless, due to the limited computing power capability of edge devices and task-related coupling relationships, IoMT faces unprecedented challenges. Considering the associative connections among tasks, this paper proposes a computing offloading policy for multiple-user devices (UDs) considering device-to-device (D2D) communication and a multi-access edge computing (MEC) technique under the scenario of IoMT. Specifically, to minimize the total delay and energy consumption concerning the requirement of IoMT, we first analyze and model the detailed local execution, MEC execution, D2D execution, and associated tasks offloading exchange model. Consequently, the associated tasks' offloading scheme of multi-UDs is formulated as a mixed-integer nonconvex optimization problem. Considering the advantages of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in processing tasks related to coupling relationships, a Double DQN based associative tasks computing offloading (DDATO) algorithm is then proposed to obtain the optimal solution, which can make the best offloading decision under the condition that tasks of UDs are associative. Furthermore, to reduce the complexity of the DDATO algorithm, the cache-aided procedure is intentionally introduced before the data training process. This avoids redundant offloading and computing procedures concerning tasks that previously have already been cached by other UDs. In addition, we use a dynamic ε — greedy strategy in the action selection section of the algorithm, thus preventing the algorithm from falling into a locally optimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that compared with other existing methods for associative task models concerning different structures in the IoMT network, the proposed algorithm can lower the total cost more effectively and efficiently while also providing a tradeoff between delay and energy consumption tolerance.