The integration of satellite communications with mobile edge computing (MEC) into space-air-ground integrated networks, known as satellite edge computing (SEC), has become a crucial research field for future communication systems to provide extensive global coverage services. This paper investigates the joint dependent task offloading and resource allocation problem for remote Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications within the SEC architecture. The proposed system leverages unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as mobile access points and edge servers and utilizes low- earth orbit (LEO) satellites and ground stations as cloud computing resources. Multiple applications with dependent tasks from IoT devices (IoTDs) are modeled as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). To address the challenges of reducing the system cost in UAV-assisted SEC, we first propose a one-to-many matching algorithm to associate IoTDs with UAVs. Then, a multi-application task sequence algorithm is devoted to merging the multiple DAGs and sorting the task order. Finally, a graph-aware asynchronous multi-agent reinforcement learning approach empowers the agents to autonomously discover optimal offloading and resource allocation strategies. Extensive simulations based on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in minimizing the system costs while meeting application latency requirements, outperforming other benchmark algorithms.

The deployment of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in edge-cloud networks faces critical challenges, including computational resource heterogeneity, memory bottlenecks, and bandwidth constraints. To address these issues, we propose EdgeSD, a novel framework that accelerates MLLM inference by integrating speculative decoding (SD) with edge-cloud collaboration. First, EdgeSD decouples the vision encoding and decoding processes of the draft MLLM across heterogeneous edge servers (ESs). This disaggregation architecture overcomes single-node memory constraints, enabling optimized resource utilization and high-resolution input processing. Second, to resolve the communication bottleneck and computational burden inherent in this distributed architecture, EdgeSD integrates a bandwidth-aware dynamic image token merging (ITM) method. Unlike general pruning techniques, this EdgeSD-specific ITM method focuses on minimizing inter-ES transmission latency for vision-decoding disaggregation while maintaining draft quality. Third, to optimize SD efficiency on consumer-grade ESs, EdgeSD employs an adaptive and scalable token tree structure solved using a parallel delta-stepping algorithm. This structure maximizes the number of accepted tokens under strict edge latency constraints. Extensive experiments on six multimodal datasets and five benchmarks with various MLLM pairs demonstrate that EdgeSD achieves substantial acceleration and throughput gains in edge-cloud collaboration scenarios using a lightweight draft MLLM, achieving 3.04-5.12x speedup compared to baseline methods.

The deployment of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on resource-constrained mobile devices poses significant challenges due to their high computational demands. This paper introduces a novel two-timescale optimization framework for efficient MLLM inference in Edge-Cloud networks, addressing the problem of multi-timescale resource management by jointly optimizing slow-timescale MLLMs deployment decisions and fast-timescale batch scheduling, GPU resource allocation, and bandwidth allocation under dynamic network conditions and spatiotemporal request heterogeneity. Our key innovation is a hierarchical twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (HALTD3) algorithm that integrates attention mechanisms and long short-term memory networks to optimize slow-timescale MLLMs deployment and fast-timescale resource allocation, minimizing weighted system costs including deployment cost, end-to-end latency, and energy consumption, while meeting stringent quality-of-service requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the HALTD3 algorithm substantially outperforms baseline methods in reducing system costs across diverse MLLM workloads and dynamic network scenarios, validating its effectiveness for practical edge-cloud collaborative inference.

Workflow scheduling plays a critical role in optimizing completion time and throughput in distributed cloud environments, leveraging the parallelism of heterogeneous computing resources. However, existing workflow scheduling algorithms often fall short due to heuristic limitations and the challenges in adaptability within heterogeneous settings, leading to suboptimal scheduling solutions. In this paper, we present a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework tailored for continuous workflow scheduling in heterogeneous environments. First, we propose an intelligent scheduler that updates the policy network through interactions with a multi-tenant environment, triggered by scheduling events. Next, the framework incorporates a Graph Attention Network (GAT) and a self-attention MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) to preprocess the workflow topology and embed dynamic features of ready tasks and available processors into the state input at each scheduling step. Additionally, a k-dimensional tree-based k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm is employed to map the output action vector to a pair of executed ready task and processor, facilitating the transition from continuous to discrete action spaces and addressing challenges associated with dynamic action spaces. Experimental results demonstrate that our method converges effectively in continuous workflow scheduling scenarios and significantly outperforms the best-known methods in terms of average makespan and load balancing efficiency.

Being an up-and-coming application scenario of mobile edge computing (MEC), the post-disaster rescue suffers multitudinous computing-intensive tasks but unstably guaranteed network connectivity. In rescue environments, quality of service (QoS), such as task execution delay, energy consumption and battery state of health (SoH), is of significant meaning. This paper studies a multi-user post-disaster MEC environment with unstable 5G communication, where device-to-device (D2D) link communication and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) are adopted to balance each user's requirement for task delay and energy consumption. A battery degradation evaluation approach to prolong battery lifetime is also presented. The distributed optimization problem is formulated into a mixed cooperative-competitive (MCC) multi-agent Markov decision process (MAMDP) and is tackled with recurrent multi-agent Proximal Policy Optimization (rMAPPO). Extensive simulations and comprehensive comparisons with other representative algorithms clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed rMAPPO-based offloading scheme.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) has played a critical role in developing sustainable smart cities and emerging numerous latency-sensitive IoT applications. Mobile edge computing (MEC) federation has the capability to incorporate a transparent resource management approach, which enables the sharing and utilization of MEC services from edge infrastructure providers (EIPs) and provides agile access services to mobile devices (MDs). In this paper, we investigate the joint optimization problem of computation offloading, task migration, and resource allocation in the MEC federation. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of latency and energy consumption while maintaining load balancing under the constraint of the long-term migration cost budget of EIPs. To address the problem, we decompose it into two sub-problems: 1) the MDs clustering sub-problem and 2) the sub-problem of joint computation offloading, task migration, and resource allocation. Firstly, an MDs clustering matching (MDCM) algorithm is proposed to cluster the MDs in edge servers (ESs) according to the differences in channel gains. Afterward, the second sub-problem is simplified by the Lyapunov optimization technique, and then we propose a Transformer-based mobility prediction model and a decentralized deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based framework to solve it. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the cost-efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising paradigm to enable computation-intensive and latency-sensitive mobile applications by offloading tasks to proximal edge servers. This paper proposes a novel federated reinforcement learning framework called Transformer-based Federated Soft Actor-Critic (TFSAC) to address a joint computation offloading and resource scheduling problem in a CPU-GPU heterogeneous MEC network while preserving privacy. Specifically, a graph attention network (GAT) extracts high-dimensional features from the task dependency graph. Rather than simply averaging weights, TFSAC applies transformer encoders to learn contextual relationships between agents and enable selective aggregation of relevant knowledge during federated model training to preserve agents’ privacy. Experiments on real-world trace data demonstrate TFSAC’s superiority over benchmarks in maximizing quality-of-service (QoS) across configurations.

Mobile edge computing is one of the key enabling technologies of smart industry solutions, providing agile and ubiquitous services for mobile devices (MDs) through offloading latency-critical tasks to edge service providers. However, it is challenging to make optimal decisions of computation offloading and resource allocation while ensuring the privacy and information security of MDs. Consequently, we consider a new vision of digital twin (DT) empowered edge networks, where the optimization problem is formulated as a two-stage incentive mechanism. First, the resource allocation strategy is determined by the interaction among DTs according to the credit-based incentives. Afterward, a distributed incentive mechanism based on the Stackelberg-based alternating direction method of multipliers is opted to obtain the optimal offloading and privacy investment strategies in parallel. Numerical results show that the proposed two-stage incentive mechanism achieves effective resource allocation and computation offloading while simultaneously improving the privacy and information security of MDs.

Mobile edge computing (MEC), which is regarded as a promising paradigm, is proposed to provide smart cities that are supported by the Internet of Things (IoT) with low processing latency at the edge of the network, by offloading latency-critical tasks from MDs to edge service providers (ESPs). In this paper, we study the interaction between ESPs and MDs by formulating a Stackelberg game model, to optimize the strategies of computation offloading and resource allocation of the MDs, and the prices and investment spending on the privacy level of ESPs. Additionally, the social effect of MDs on privacy concerns is incorporated to study the impacts on the payoffs of players. We utilize distributed Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm to address the Stackelberg equilibrium problem in a distributed manner. Finally, numerical results illustrate that our proposed scheme can jointly achieve the maximum profits of ESPs and utilities of MDs.

With the emergence of the Internet of things (IOT), smart cities have changed from concept to reality. Meanwhile, those countless IOT devices are scattered in every corner of the city which generate a mass of sensing big data and IoT services every minute. However, the computing capability of IoT devices is so constrained that IoT devices fail to process computational-intensive services. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emergent architecture for reinforcing the computing capabilities of IoT devices to cope with the resource-hungry IoT services. In the MEC system, IoT devices are capable of offloading part of IoT services to the cloudlet for execution. Although offloading can prominently mitigate the computing burden on IoT devices, it may result in enormous transmission cost and consuming resource of cloudlets. Therefore, it poses major challenges to how to achieve trade-offs in terms of time cost, energy cost of IOT devices and resource utilization of cloudlets. In consideration of the challenge, we devise a collaborative computation offloading approach to acquire the above trade-off in the collaboration of IoT device-cloudlet-cloud three ends. Firstly, the balancing strategies of the trade-off are obtained by leveraging the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D). We then employ a multi-criterion decision-making method that combines the entropy weight (EW) method and technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS), is known as (EW-TOPSIS), to acquire the optimum offloading decision in the acquired balancing strategies. Finally, extensive experiments and theoretical analysis validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.