MRLATO: An Adaptive Task Offloading Mechanism Based on Meta Reinforcement Learning in Edge Computing Environment

Traditional cloud computing models struggle to meet the requirements of latency-sensitive applications when processing large amounts of data. As a solution, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) extends computing resources to the edge of the network to reduce processing delays and improve user experience. However, in dynamically changing edge computing environments, effective decision making on whether to offload tasks to edge servers remains a core challenge. For this purpose, we propose MRLATO, an adaptive task offloading mechanism based on Meta Reinforcement Learning (MRL), which exploits a large amount of a priori knowledge of different tasks to achieve fast adaptation. The task offloading process is modelled as multiple Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and solved using a Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) neural network integrating multi-head attention and recursive task sequencing. It is shown by the experimental results that the proposed method has the lowest latency in all experimental settings and the convergence efficiency is improved by 14.06% compared to the traditional Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm. This research fully demonstrates the significant benefits of the deep integration of MRL with the edge computing domain, providing new optimisation ideas for task offloading decisions.