Latency-Aware Container Scheduling in Edge Cluster Upgrades: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

In Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), Internet of Things (IoT) devices offload computationally-intensive tasks to edge nodes, where they are executed within containers, reducing the reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure. Cluster software upgrades are essential to maintain the efficient and secure operation of edge clusters. However, traditional cloud cluster upgrade strategies are ill-suited for edge clusters due to their geographically distributed nature and resource limitations. Therefore, it is crucial to properly schedule containers during edge cluster upgrades to minimize the impact on running tasks. This article proposes a latency-aware container scheduling algorithm for efficient edge cluster upgrading. Specifically: 1) We formulate the online container scheduling problem for edge cluster upgrade to minimize the total task latency. 2) We propose a policy gradient-based reinforcement learning algorithm that addresses this problem by considering the characteristics of MEC, including heterogeneous resources, image distribution, and low-latency requirements. Subsequently, a location feature extraction method based on self-attention is designed to fully extract and utilize edge node distribution. 3) Experiments based on simulated and real-world data traces demonstrate that our algorithm reduces total task latency by approximately 30% compared to baseline algorithms.