A DQN-Based Frame Aggregation and Task Offloading Approach for Edge-Enabled IoMT

• Published in: IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering Vol. 10; no. 3; pp. 1339 - 1351
• Main Authors: Yuan, Xiaoming, Zhang, Zedan, Chujun Feng, Cui, Yejia, Garg, Sahil, Kaddoum, Georges, Yu, Keping
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Japanese
• Published: Piscataway Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 01.05.2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Agglomeration; Body area networks; Computation offloading; Data communication; Data transmission; Delay; Edge computing; Electronic devices; Energy consumption; Internet of medical things; Medical devices; Medical electronics; Mobile computing; Quality of service; Wireless communications
• ISSN: 2334-329X
• DOI: 10.1109/tnse.2022.3218313

The rapid expansion of wearable medical devices and health data of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) poses new challenges to the high Quality of Service (QoS) of intelligent health care in the foreseeable 6G era. Healthcare applications and services require ultra reliable, ultra low delay and energy consumption data communication and computing. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technologies empowered IoMT to deal with huge data sensing, processing and transmission in high QoS. However, traditional frame aggregation schemes in WBAN generate too much control frames during data transmission, which leads to high delay and energy consumption and is not flexible enough. In this paper, a Deep Q-learning Network (DQN) based Frame Aggregation and Task Offloading Approach (DQN-FATOA) is proposed. Firstly, different service data were divided into queues with similar QoS requirements. Then, the length of the frame aggregation was selected dynamically by the aggregation node according to the delay, energy consumption, and throughput by DQN. Finally, the number of tasks offloaded was selected due to the current state. Compared with the traditional scheme, the simulation results show that the proposed DQN-FATOA has effectively reduced delay and energy consumption, and improved the throughput and overall utilization of WBAN.