Deep Reinforcement Learning based Energy Efficient Edge Computing for Internet of Vehicles

Mobile network operators (MNOs) allocate computing and caching resources for mobile users by deploying a central control system. Existing studies mainly use programming and heuristic methods to solve the resource allocation problem, which ignores the energy cost problem that is really significant to the MNO. To solve this problem, we design a joint computing and caching framework by integrating deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm. Especially, we focus on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) scenario, which needs the support of mobile network provided by MNO. We first formulate an optimization problem to minimize MNO's energy cost by considering the computation and caching energy costs jointly. Then, we turn the formulated problem into a reinforcement learning problem and utilize DDPG methods to solve this problem. The final simulation result shows that our solution can reduce energy costs by more than 15% while ensuring the tasks can be completed on time.