Solving Task Scheduling Problems in Dew Computing via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Due to mobile and IoT devices’ ubiquity and their ever-growing processing potential, Dew computing environments have been emerging topics for researchers. These environments allow resource-constrained devices to contribute computing power to others in a local network. One major challenge in these environments is task scheduling: that is, how to distribute jobs across devices available in the network. In this paper, we propose to distribute jobs in Dew environments using artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, we show that an AI agent, known as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), can learn to distribute jobs in a simulated Dew environment better than existing methods—even when tested over job sequences that are five times longer than the sequences used during the training. We found that using our technique, we can gain up to 77% in performance compared with using human-designed heuristics.