In IoT (Internet of Things) edge computing, task offloading can lead to additional transmission delays and transmission energy consumption. To reduce the cost of resources required for task offloading and improve the utilization of server resources, in this paper, we model the task offloading problem as a joint decision making problem for cost minimization, which integrates the processing latency, processing energy consumption, and the task throw rate of latency-sensitive tasks. The Online Predictive Offloading (OPO) algorithm based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks is proposed to solve the above task offloading decision problem. In the training phase of the model, this algorithm predicts the load of the edge server in real-time with the LSTM algorithm, which effectively improves the convergence accuracy and convergence speed of the DRL algorithm in the offloading process. In the testing phase, the LSTM network is used to predict the characteristics of the next task, and then the computational resources are allocated for the task in advance by the DRL decision model, thus further reducing the response delay of the task and enhancing the offloading performance of the system. The experimental evaluation shows that this algorithm can effectively reduce the average latency by 6.25%, the offloading cost by 25.6%, and the task throw rate by 31.7%.

Unmanned surface vessel (USV) has been widely used in various fields due to its autonomous advantages, and path planning is a crucial technology for autonomy. However, using global path planning alone cannot avoid moving obstacles, while using local path planning alone may lead to falling into local minima and fail to reach the target. Therefore, this article proposed the dynamic target artificial potential field (DTAPF) method which use a dynamic point that follows the global path generated by the A* algorithm as the target point of the artificial potential field (APF). In addition, in order to improve response time and safety of unmanned surface vessel (USV) navigation of the traditional centralized path planning methods, we proposed an edge computing architecture for global path planning and an offset guidance method to avoid moving obstacles while confirming to the collision regulations (CORLEGs). The experimental results show that, using the method proposed in this article, USV can reach the target in an environment with moving obstacles with high probability (about 99.4%), and compared to the traditional APF algorithm, our method can reduce collision probability by 71% with almost no increase in average path length and average navigation time. Besides, our architecture has much lower computing delay than local computing, and also lower than cloud computing.

Internet of Things (IoT) is made up with growing number of facilities, which are digitalized to have sensing, networking and computing capabilities. Traditionally, the large volume of data generated by the IoT devices are processed in a centralized cloud computing model. However, it is no longer able to meet the computational demands of large-scale and geographically distributed IoT devices for executing tasks of high performance, low latency, and low energy consumption. Therefore, edge computing has emerged as a complement of cloud computing. To improve system performance, it is necessary to partition and offload some tasks generated by local devices to the remote cloud or edge nodes. However, most of the current research work focuses on designing efficient offloading strategies and service orchestration. Little attention has been paid to the problem of jointly optimizing task partitioning and offloading for different application types. In this paper, we make a comprehensive overview on the existing task partitioning and offloading frameworks, focusing on the input and core of decision engine of the framework for task partitioning and offloading. We also propose comprehensive taxonomy metrics for comparing task partitioning and offloading approaches in the IoT cloud-edge collaborative computing framework. Finally, we discuss the problems and challenges that may be encountered in the future.

Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) generate a large amount of data that needs to be processed in real time when they work, but they are usually limited by computational and battery resources, so they need to offload their tasks to the edge for processing. However, when numerous USVs offload their tasks to the edge nodes, some offloaded tasks may be thrown due to queuing timeouts. Existing task offloading methods generally consider the latency or the overall system energy consumption caused by the collaborative processing at the edge and end layers, and do not consider the wasted energy when the tasks are thrown. Therefore, to address the above situation, this paper establishes a task offloading model to minimize long-term task latency and energy consumption by jointly considering the requirments of latency and energy-sensitive tasks and the overall load dynamics in the cloud, edge, and end layers. A deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based Task Offloading with Cloud Edge Jointly Load Balance Optimization algorithm (TOLBO) is proposed to select the best edge server or cloud server for offloading. Simulation results show that the algorithm can improve the utilization of energy consumption of the cloud edge nodes compared with other algorithms. At the same time, it can significantly reduce the task throw rate, average latency, and energy consumption of end devices.