Deep reinforcement learning based mobility management in a MEC-Enabled cellular IoT network

Abstract

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has paved the way for new Cellular Internet of Things (CIoT) paradigm, where resource constrained CIoT Devices (CDs) can offload tasks to a computing server located at either a Base Station (BS) or an edge node. For CDs moving in high speed, seamless mobility is crucial during the MEC service migration from one base station (BS) to another. In this paper, we investigate the problem of joint power allocation and Handover (HO) management in a MEC network with a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach. To handle the hybrid action space (continuous: power allocation and discrete: HO decision), we leverage Parameterized Deep Q-Network (P-DQN) to learn the near-optimal solution. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed algorithm (P-DQN) outperforms the conventional approaches, such as the nearest BS +random power and random BS +random power, in terms of reward, HO cost, and total power consumption. According to simulation results, HO occurs almost in the edge point of two BS, which means the HO is almost perfectly managed. In addition, the total power consumption is around 0.151 watts in P-DQN while it is about 0.75 watts in nearest BS +random power and random BS +random power.