Ets-ddpg: an energy-efficient and QoS-guaranteed edge task scheduling approach based on deep reinforcement learning

With the development of 5 G communication and Internet of Things (IoT) technology, increasing data is generated by a large number of IoT devices at edge networks. Therefore, increasing need for distributed Data Centers (DCs) are seen from enterprises and building elastic applications upon DCs deployed over decentralized edge infrastructures is becoming popular. Nevertheless, it remains a great difficulty to effectively schedule computational tasks to appropriate DCs at the edge end with low energy consumption and satisfactory user-perceived Quality of Service. It is especially true when DCs deployed over an edge environment, which can be highly inhomogeneous in terms of resource configurations and computing capabilities. To this end, we develop an edge task scheduling method by synthesizing a M/G/1/PR queuing model for characterizing the workload distribution and a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm for yielding high-quality schedules with low energy cost. We conduct extensive numerical analysis as well and show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of average task response time and energy consumption.