Distributed Multi-Agent Learning for Service Function Chain Partial Offloading at the Edge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) along with "learning at the edge" brings unique opportunities for enhancing the utilization of resources in the next generation wireless networks. Using Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Service Function Chains (SFCs), a set of ordered virtual network functions (VNFs), can be deployed within the MEC infrastructure. The user equipment (UEs) can offload VNFs with intense computational load to the MEC servers with rich storage and computation resources. In this paper, we address the problem of partial offloading of a chain of services where each VNF of the SFC request can be either performed locally or offloaded onto a MEC server. The objective is to concurrently minimize the long-term cost of the UEs which is given in terms of both delay and energy consumption. This problem is highly complex and calls for distributed multi-agent learning techniques. We formulate the problem as a distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning problem and use double deep Q-network (DDQN) algorithm to solve it. Our simulation results show that the proposed DDQN-based solution has comparable results to an exhaustive search algorithm.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".