“Fed-DRL†: A Timeliness Optimization Method for Dynamic Data Acquisition System Based on Mobile Edge Computing

Age of Information (AoI) is a metric to describe the timeliness of a system proposed in recent years. It measures the freshness of the latest received data from the perspective of the target node in the system. This work studies a kind of dynamic data acquisition system for urban security that can update and control the situation of urban environmental security by collecting environmental data. The collected data packets need to be uploaded to the cloud center in time for data update, which has high requirements on the timeliness of the system and freshness of data. However, due to the limited computing capacity of mobile terminals and the pressure of bandwidth for data transmission, problems such as high data execution delay and transmission interruption are caused. Emerging mobile edge computing (MEC), a new model of computing that extends cloud computing capabilities to the edge network, promises to solve these problems. This work focuses on the timeliness of the system, as measured by the average AoI across all mobile terminals. First, a timeliness optimization model is defined, and a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm combined with an attention mechanism is proposed to carry out computing offloading and resource allocation through the continuous interaction between agent and environment; then, in order to improve algorithm performance and data security, the federated learning mode is proposed to train agents; finally, the proposed algorithm is compared with other main baseline algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm not only outperforms other algorithms in optimizing system timeliness, but also improves the stability of training.