Aug 2026· 2026 6th International Conference on Emerging Smart Technologies and Applications (eSmarTA)· pp. 1-7· 0 citations· 20 references
Abstract
A new paradigm for satisfying the ever-growing demands of real-time Sixth Generation (6G) applications is Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). Additionally, base stations and Internet of Things devices that incorporate renewable energy harvesting capabilities have the potential to lower grid energy use. To maximize system potential and lower carbon emissions, it is crucial to make effective decisions about job offloading and resource allocation. A carbon-aware MEC architecture that uses both grid and renewable energy sources is proposed in this paper. Our goal is to jointly manage resource allocation and task offloading while monitoring carbon emissions and task queue delays to optimize system behavior under uncertainty, specifically for stochastic workloads and variable renewable generation. To balance these two cost components (emissions and queue length), we create a combined optimization problem. We develop a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based joint optimization technique to address this issue in a constantly changing environment. In the optimization, we consider greedy policy (GP) and full offloading (FO), as well as time-average carbon emission (TACE) and time-average queue length (TAQL) as performance metrics, and time-average queue length (TAQL) and full execution (FE) as baseline strategies; we also evaluate normalized time-average cumulative reward (NTACR). This method uses continuous-action reinforcement learning to generate efficient, real-time control policies. For the proposed MEC network, numerical statistics show that our approach can lead to effective offloading and lower carbon emissions.
This study jointly optimizes task offloading and system resource scheduling to minimize the long-term delay–energy cost of NOMA-MEC systems using a master-refined multi-agent proximal policy optimization algorithm.
A task scheduling method using the Deep Q-Network to determine the computation node for the computation task and a dynamic congestion-aware mechanism to determine a low-cost routing path is proposed, which gradually obtains an effective task scheduling scheme through multiple rounds of alternating iterations.
A constrained optimization model that supports different management goals through alternative objective functions (latency-aware or power-aware) while enforcing operational constraints, including node capacities, slice-specific latency bounds, and explicit limits on VNF migrations/relocations between scheduling periods is proposed.
R. Moreno-Vozmediano, E. Huedo, R. Montero et al.· Journal of Network and Syste...· 0 citations
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technologies, smart libraries increasingly require low-latency and energy-efficient computing support for heterogeneous services such as access control, intelligent recommendation, indoor navigation, and book localization. To address the limitations of cloud-only processing, this paper investigates task-offloading optimization in a cloud-assisted mobile edge computing environment for smart library services. A three-tier cloud–edge–device collaborative architecture is first established, and the task-offloading problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem that jointly minimizes task-completion delay and user-side energy consumption under latency, resource-capacity, and coverage constraints. To solve the dynamic decision-making problem, a preference-adaptive dueling double deep Q-network algorithm, termed PA-DDQN, is proposed by integrating preference conditioning, multi-head attention, a dueling architecture, and double Q-learning. Simulation results show that PA-DDQN achieves better performance than fixed offloading strategies and representative reinforcement-learning baselines. Under the heaviest task load, PA-DDQN reduces the average task-completion delay by 23.1% and 31.0% compared with D3QN and DDQN, respectively, while reducing energy consumption by 5.8% and 9.9%. It also improves the task success rate by 14.8% and 21.7%, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing service responsiveness, energy efficiency, and reliability in smart library MEC systems.
Jingjing Qu, Peiying Zhang, Ruixin Wang et al.· Information· 0 citations
Virtualization in 5G and beyond networks enables the creation of virtual networks (i.e., network slices) tailored to the needs of different applications. To maximize revenue under limited infrastructure resources, InPs must decide in real time whether to admit incoming slice requests (SRs) based on their resource demands and offered values, while accounting for the opportunity cost of consuming scarce resources. To address this challenge, we introduce Online Pricing-based Slice Admission Control and Resource Allocation (OPA) framework. This framework dynamically assigns pseudo-prices to resources that capture long-term scarcity and anticipated inter-temporal opportunity costs. The short-term admission and resource allocation decisions for each SR are then guided by these prices. Additionally, we design an exponential pricing strategy that guarantees bounded worst-case performance. To improve practical performance, we further develop a data-driven exponential pricing approach that learns from historical data. Evaluations on a real-world network topology show that it improves mean revenue by 32.2% and 26.7% over state-of-the-art DRL and optimization-based approaches, respectively, while reducing computational cost by an order of magnitude relative to the latter.
Muhammad Sulaiman, Bo Sun, M. A. Salahuddin et al.· 0 citations
The integration of 5G/6G networks with the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) requires efficient computational offloading for data-intensive applications such as autonomous driving and augmented reality. Although Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer agile mobile edge computing (MEC) capabilities, their operational efficiency is hampered by high mobility, limited battery life, and the complexity of joint resource optimization. Existing offloading strategies often fail to simultaneously optimize latency, energy consumption, and resource utilization under dynamic IoV conditions. This paper proposes a novel Energy-Optimized Lightweight Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework for intelligent task offloading in UAV-assisted IoV networks. Our approach leverages a simplified Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) to dynamically manage task partitioning by intelligent offloading decisions, UAV trajectory planning through optimized path forecasting, and resource allocation through adaptive computation distribution. Key innovations include a streamlined state-space design that reduces computational overhead by 30% and a composite reward function that balances latency and energy objectives. These are realized by a prioritized experience replay mechanism and a target network separation strategy that enhances learning stability. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves a task success rate of 98.5%, reduces latency by 40%, and maintains a 78.1%. The results confirm the framework’s superiority, demonstrating significant improvements over its base architecture (DQN), its enhanced variant (DDQN), and other state-of-the-art baselines like MADDPG and game-theoretic approaches, thereby providing a robust solution for practical UAV-IoV deployments.
Fitzgerald Quincy Clarke, J. Odoom, Ruth S. Kubvoruno et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations