Fuzzy-Assisted Mobile Edge Orchestrator and SARSA Learning for Flexible Offloading in Heterogeneous IoT Environment

In the era of heterogeneous 5G networks, Internet of Things (IoT) devices have significantly altered our daily life by providing innovative applications and services. However, these devices process large amounts of data traffic and their application requires an extremely fast response time and a massive amount of computational resources, leading to a high failure rate for task offloading and considerable latency due to congestion. To improve the quality of services (QoS) and performance due to the dynamic flow of requests from devices, numerous task offloading strategies in the area of multi-access edge computing (MEC) have been proposed in previous studies. Nevertheless, the neighboring edge servers, where computational resources are in excess, have not been considered, leading to unbalanced loads among edge servers in the same network tier. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a collaboration algorithm between a fuzzy-logic-based mobile edge orchestrator (MEO) and state-action-reward-state-action (SARSA) reinforcement learning, which we call the Fu-SARSA algorithm. We aim to minimize the failure rate and service time of tasks and decide on the optimal resource allocation for offloading, such as a local edge server, cloud server, or the best neighboring edge server in the MEC network. Four typical application types, healthcare, AR, infotainment, and compute-intensive applications, were used for the simulation. The performance results demonstrate that our proposed Fu-SARSA framework outperformed other algorithms in terms of service time and the task failure rate, especially when the system was overloaded.