Online Decentralized Task Allocation Optimization for Edge Collaborative Networks

In centralized task allocation strategies, real-time status information needs to be collected from distributed edge nodes. Therefore, the overloaded transmission on backbone network appears and leads to devastating decrease in the per-formance of centralized strategies. To address this issue, this paper proposes a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning based online decentralized task allocation mechanism, where each edge node makes task allocation decisions based on local network-state information. A centralized-training distributed-execution method is adopted to decrease data transmission load, and a value decomposition-based technique is applied at training stage for improving long-term performance of task allocation in edge col-laborative networks. Extensive experiments are conducted, and evaluation results demonstrate that our mechanism outperforms other three baseline algorithms in reducing the long-term average system delay and improving request completion rate.