UAV-IRS-assisted energy harvesting for edge computing based on deep reinforcement learning

In the internet of everything (IoE) era, the proliferation of internet of things (IoT) devices is accelerating rapidly. Particularly, smaller devices are increasingly constrained by hardware limitations that impact their computational capacity, communication bandwidth, and battery longevity. Our research explores a multi-device, multi-access edge computing (MEC) environment within small cells to address the challenges posed by the hardware limitations of IoT devices in this environment. We employ wireless power transfer (WPT) to ensure these IoT devices have sufficient energy for task processing. We propose a system architecture in which an intelligent reflective surface (IRS) is carried by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to enhance communication conditions. For sustainable energy harvesting (EH), we integrate a normal distribution into the objective function. We utilize a softmax deep double deterministic policy gradients (SD3) algorithm, based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL), to optimize the computational and communication capabilities of IoT devices. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our SD3-based EH edge computing (EHEC-SD3) algorithm surpasses existing DRL algorithms in our explored environments, achieving more than 90% in overall optimization and EH performance.