Dependent Task Offloading and Resource Allocation via Deep Reinforcement Learning for Extended Reality in Mobile Edge Networks

Abstract

Extended reality (XR) is an immersive technology widely applied in various fields. Due to the real-time interaction required between users and virtual environments, XR applications are highly sensitive to latency. Furthermore, handling computationally intensive tasks on wireless XR devices leads to energy consumption, which is a critical performance constraint for XR applications. It has been noted that the XR task can be decoupled to several subtasks with mixed serial–parallel relationships. Furthermore, the evaluation of XR application performance involves both subjective assessments from users and objective evaluations, such as of energy consumption. Therefore, in edge computing environments, ways to integrate task offloading for XR subtasks to meet users’ demands for XR applications is a complex and challenging issue. To address this issue, this paper constructs a wireless XR system based on mobile edge computing (MEC) and conducts research on the joint optimization of multi-user communication channel access and task offloading. Specifically, we consider the migration of partitioned XR tasks to MEC servers and formulate a joint optimization problem for communication channel access and task offloading. The objective is to maximize the ratio of quality of experience (QoE) to energy consumption while meeting the user QoE requirements. Subsequently, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning-based algorithm to address this optimization problem. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm in meeting user QoE demands and improving energy conversion efficiency, regardless of the XR task partitioning strategies employed.