A3C-based Computation Offloading and Service Caching in Cloud-Edge Computing Networks

This paper jointly considers computation offloading, service caching and resource allocation optimization in a threetier mobile cloud-edge computing structure, in which Mobile Users (MUs) have subscribed to Cloud Service Center (CSC) for computation offloading services and paid related fees monthly or yearly, and the CSC provides computation services to subscribed MUs and charges service fees. The problem is formulated as Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP), aiming to meet the delay requirements of MUs while reducing the cost of the CSC. Then, an Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic-based (A3C-based) method is proposed to solve the optimization problem. The simulation results show that the proposed A3C-based method significantly outperforms the other baseline methods in various scenarios.