Pub Date : 2024-11-01DOI: 10.1109/TSC.2024.3489435
Tao Ouyang;Xu Chen;Liekang Zeng;Zhi Zhou
To meet the stringent requirement of edge intelligence applications, resource-constrained devices can offload their task to nearby resource-rich devices. Resource awareness, as a prime prerequisite for offloading decision-making, is critical for achieving efficient collaborative computation performance. Although major works have explored computation offloading in dynamic edge environments, the impact of fresh resource information perception has not been formally investigated. To bridge the gap, we design a cost-aware edge resource probing (CERP) framework for infrastructure-free edge computing, where a task device self-organizes its resource probing to enable informed computation offloading. We first formulate the joint optimization of device probing and offloading as a multi-stage optimal stopping problem and derive a multi-threshold-based optimal strategy with theoretical guarantees. Accordingly, we devise a data-driven layered learning mechanism to handle more complex real-world scenarios. The layered learning enables the task device to adaptively learn the optimal probing sequence and decision thresholds on the fly, aiming to strike a good balance between the gain of choosing the best edge device and the accumulated cost of deep resource probing. To further boost its learning efficiency, we replace the $epsilon$