Hierarchical Learning for IRS-Assisted MEC Systems with Rate-Splitting Multiple Access
For wireless communication systems, this work addresses resource competition and interference in IRS-assisted MEC by integrating RSMA and hierarchical DRL, though the improvements are incremental over existing methods.
This paper jointly optimizes passive and active beamforming, task offloading, transmit power, and RSMA parameters in an IRS-assisted MEC system to minimize average delay. The proposed hierarchical deep reinforcement learning algorithm achieves superior convergence and outperforms benchmarks.
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) systems have shown notable improvements in efficiency, such as reduced latency, higher data rates, and better energy efficiency. However, the resource competition among users will lead to uneven allocation, increased latency, and lower throughput. Fortunately, the rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) technique has emerged as a promising solution for managing interference and optimizing resource allocation in MEC systems. This paper studies an IRS-assisted MEC system with RSMA, aiming to jointly optimize the passive beamforming of the IRS, the active beamforming of the base station, the task offloading allocation, the transmit power of users, the ratios of public and private information allocation, and the decoding order of the RSMA to minimize the average delay from a novel uplink transmission perspective. Since the formulated problem is non-convex and the optimization variables are highly coupled, we propose a hierarchical deep reinforcement learning-based algorithm to optimize both continuous and discrete variables of the problem. Additionally, to better extract channel features, we design a novel network architecture within the policy and evaluation networks of the proposed algorithm, combining convolutional neural networks and densely connected convolutional network for feature extraction. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm not only exhibits excellent convergence performance but also outperforms various benchmarks.