A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Service Migration in MEC-enabled Vehicular Networks

• Published in: 2021 IEEE 46th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN) pp. 273 - 280
• Main Authors: Abouaomar, Amine, Mlika, Zoubeir, Filali, Abderrahime, Cherkaoui, Soumaya, Kobbane, Abdellatif
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 04.10.2021
• Subjects: Energy consumption; Markov processes; Multi-access edge computing; Quality of service; Reinforcement learning; Servers; service migration; Simulation; Transforms; vehicular networks
• DOI: 10.1109/LCN52139.2021.9524882

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a key enabler to reduce the latency of vehicular network. Due to the vehicles mobility, their requested services (e.g., infotainment services) should frequently be migrated across different MEC servers to guarantee their stringent quality of service requirements. In this paper, we study the problem of service migration in a MEC-enabled vehicular network in order to minimize the total service latency and migration cost. This problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer program and is linearized to help obtaining the optimal solution using off-the-shelf solvers. Then, to obtain an efficient solution, it is modeled as a multi-agent Markov decision process and solved by leveraging deep Q learning (DQL) algorithm. The proposed DQL scheme performs a proactive services migration while ensuring their continuity under high mobility constraints. Finally, simulations results show that the proposed DQL scheme achieves close-to-optimal performance.