When Edge Computing Meets Microgrid: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
Md. Shirajum Munir, Sarder Fakhrul Abedin, Nguyen Hoang Khoi Tran, Choong Seon Hong · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2019
The computational tasks at multiaccess edge computing (MEC) are unpredictable in nature, which raises uneven energy demand for MEC networks. Thus, to handle this problem, microgrid has the potentiality to provides seamless energy supply from its energy sources (i.e., renewable, nonrenewable, and storage). However, supplying energy from the microgrid faces challenges due to the high uncertainty and irregularity of the renewable energy generation over the time horizon. Therefore, in this paper, we study about the microgrid-enabled MEC networks' energy supply plan, where we first formulate an optimization problem and the objective is to minimize the energy consumption of microgrid-enabled MEC networks. The problem is a mixed integer nonlinear optimization with computational and latency constraints for tasks fulfillment, and also coupled with the dependencies of uncertainty for both energy consumption and generation. Therefore, we show that the problem is an NP-hard problem. As a result, second, we decompose our formulated problem into two subproblems: 1) energy-efficient tasks assignment problem for MEC into community discovery problem and 2) energy supply plan problem into Markov decision process. Third, we apply a low complexity density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise to solve the first subproblem for each base station distributedly. Sequentially, we use the output of the first subproblem as a input for solving the second subproblem, where we apply a model-based deep reinforcement learning. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the significant performance gain of the proposed model with a high accuracy energy supply plan.