When Deep Reinforcement Learning Meets Federated Learning: Intelligent Multi-Timescale Resource Management for Multi-access Edge Computing in 5G Ultra Dense Network

Ultra-dense edge computing (UDEC) has great potential, especially in the 5G era, but it still faces challenges in its current solutions, such as the lack of: i) efficient utilization of multiple 5G resources (e.g., computation, communication, storage and service resources); ii) low overhead offloading decision making and resource allocation strategies; and iii) privacy and security protection schemes. Thus, we first propose an intelligent ultra-dense edge computing (I-UDEC) framework, which integrates blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into 5G ultra-dense edge computing networks. First, we show the architecture of the framework. Then, in order to achieve real-time and low overhead computation offloading decisions and resource allocation strategies, we design a novel two-timescale deep reinforcement learning (\textit{2Ts-DRL}) approach, consisting of a fast-timescale and a slow-timescale learning process, respectively. The primary objective is to minimize the total offloading delay and network resource usage by jointly optimizing computation offloading, resource allocation and service caching placement. We also leverage federated learning (FL) to train the \textit{2Ts-DRL} model in a distributed manner, aiming to protect the edge devices' data privacy. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of both the \textit{2Ts-DRL} and FL in the I-UDEC framework and prove that our proposed algorithm can reduce task execution time up to 31.87%.