Intelligent Cooperative Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation for Dual-Dependency Tasks in Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technologies, leading to the explosive growth of intelligent applications characterized by resource intensity and latency sensitivity, such as image processing and smart home. In practice, an application typically consists of multiple tasks with execution dependencies, where the output of some tasks serves as the input for specific others. Recently, the design of computation offloading methods for such execution-dependent tasks has received extensive research. However, computation offloading for execution-dependent tasks with service dependencies in resource-constrained multi-user, multi-edge-server cooperative MEC systems has not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we formulate a cooperative computation offloading problem for dual-dependency tasks in multi-edge-server scenarios with limited service and computing resources, aiming to minimize the long-term average service delay for multiple users. To solve this problem, we propose a recurrent multi-agent reinforcement learning-based dual-dependency task offloading (RMA-DepO) algorithm, which enables users to communicate during training to explore and learn optimal joint task offloading and computing resource allocation strategies, and to make distributed offloading decisions at execution time. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RMA-DepO algorithm outperforms several baselines under different network settings, demonstrating its effectiveness in coordinating edge resources for cooperative computation of dual-dependency tasks.