Decentralized and Fault-Tolerant Task Offloading for Enabling Network Edge Intelligence

Edge intelligence has recently attracted great interest from industry and academia, and it greatly improves the processing speed at the edge by moving data and artificial intelligence to the edge of the network. However, edge devices have bottlenecks in battery capacity and computing power, making it challenging to perform computing tasks in dynamic and harsh network environments. Especially in disaster scenarios, edge (rescue) devices are more likely to fail due to unreliable wireless communications and scattered rescue requests, which makes it urgent to explore how to provide low-latency, reliable services through edge collaboration. In this article, we investigate the task offloading mechanism in mobile edge computing networks, aiming to ensure fault tolerance and rapid response of computing services in dynamic and harsh scenarios. Specifically, we design a fault-tolerant distributed task offloading scheme, which minimizes task execution time and system energy consumption through the multi-agent proximal policy optimization algorithm. Furthermore, we introduce logarithmic ratio reward functions and action masking to reduce the impact of different task queue lengths while accelerating model convergence. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm is suitable for service failure scenarios, effectively meeting the reliability requirements of tasks while simultaneously reducing system energy consumption and processing latency.