Graph Reinforcement Learning-based CNN Inference Offloading in Dynamic Edge Computing
Nan Li, Alexandros Iosifidis, Qi Zhang · GLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference · 2022
This paper studies the computational offloading of CNN inference in dynamic multi-access edge computing (MEC) networks. To address the uncertainties in communication time and Edge servers' available capacity, we use early-exit mechanism to terminate the computation earlier to meet the deadline of inference tasks. We design a reward function to trade off the communication, computation and inference accuracy, and formu-late the offloading problem of CNN inference as a maximization problem with the goal of maximizing the average inference accuracy and throughput in long term. To solve the maxi-mization problem, we propose a graph reinforcement learning-based early-exit mechanism (GRLE), which outperforms the state-of-the-art work, deep reinforcement learning-based online offloading (DROO) and its enhanced method, DROO with early-exit mechanism (DROOE), under different dynamic scenarios. The experimental results show that G RLE achieves the average accuracy up to 3.41 x over graph reinforcement learning (GRL) and 1.45x over DROOE, which shows the advantages of GRLE for offloading decision-making in dynamic MEC.