Open Access
ARTICLE
Cooperative Task Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing via an Improved MASAC Framework
1 School of Robotics and Automation, Hubei University of Automotive Technology, Shiyan, China
2 Yunnan International Joint Laboratory of Agricultural Remote Sensing and Digital Technology, Yunnan Hanzhe Technology Co., Ltd., Kunming, China
3 Key Laboratory of Plateau Agricultural Environment Monitoring and Control, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Kunming, China
* Corresponding Author: Changjun Deng. Email:
Computers, Materials & Continua 2026, 89(1), 52 https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2026.084892
Received 06 May 2026; Accepted 30 June 2026; Issue published 13 August 2026
Abstract
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an effective paradigm for supporting latency-sensitive and computation-intensive intelligent applications. However, in dynamic mobile-edge network scenarios, mobile terminals experience time-varying wireless links due to mobility. Tasks may also arrive unpredictably, while multiple terminals compete for limited edge resources. As a result, MEC systems may suffer from service congestion and unbalanced resource utilization, which increases end-to-end latency and energy consumption. This paper investigates cooperative task offloading in dynamic MEC networks. The considered system comprises one macro base station and multiple small base stations equipped with edge-computing resources. In each time slot, each mobile terminal selects a service option, determines the task offloading ratio, and chooses its transmit power for task uploading. This sequential decision process is formulated as a multi-agent problem with continuous action spaces. Under the centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) framework, the problem is further modeled as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP). Standard multi-agent soft actor-critic (MASAC) is not fully suitable for this problem. Its original action model does not handle bounded continuous actions well. Its exploration strength may also be unsuitable at different training stages. Frequent policy updates can further make training unstable when critic estimates are inaccurate. To address these issues, this paper develops an adaptive Beta-policy and delayed-update multi-agent soft actor-critic method, abbreviated as ABDMASAC. This method uses a Beta policy to model bounded actions. It adjusts the entropy coefficient during training and delays policy updates to reduce training oscillations. Experimental results show that, under a unified training budget and a consistent evaluation protocol, the proposed method achieves a better overall trade-off than the selected MASAC-backbone and on-policy MARL baselines under the considered simulation settings in terms of overall reward, average end-to-end latency, and average energy consumption. In the large-scale scenario, compared with MASAC, it improves the overall reward by 17.8%, reduces the average end-to-end latency by 18.0%, and lowers the average energy consumption by 11.4%.Keywords
Intelligent mobile applications such as environmental perception, object recognition, path planning, and cooperative control require timely computation, yet mobile terminals are limited by onboard computing capacity and battery energy. Cloud-only execution provides abundant resources but introduces long transmission paths and response delay. MEC mitigates this limitation by placing computation near terminals and enabling task offloading between local and edge resources.
Cooperative offloading remains difficult in dynamic MEC networks because terminal mobility changes wireless links, stochastic arrivals create time-varying workloads, and multiple terminals compete for shared edge resources. This paper therefore studies cooperative task offloading in dynamic MEC networks, jointly considering node association, task offloading ratio, and transmit-power control under communication, computation, and queueing constraints. The resulting problem is modeled as a multi-agent continuous decision-making problem under CTDE, and an improved MASAC-based method is developed to address bounded action representation, exploration adaptation, and training stability. The main contributions are summarized as follows.
(1) An MEC system model is established for cooperative task offloading in dynamic mobile-edge network scenarios. The model captures terminal mobility, time-varying wireless links, spatially heterogeneous task arrivals, and shared edge-resource competition. Based on this model, the task-offloading problem is formulated to reduce latency and energy consumption while suppressing queue accumulation.
(2) Under the CTDE framework, node association, task offloading, and transmit power control are unified into a multi-agent joint decision-making problem. Considering local observation constraints and joint state transition characteristics, the problem is further modeled as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP).
(3) To adapt MASAC to the bounded and relaxed hybrid action structure of cooperative MEC offloading, an improved MASAC-based method, named ABDMASAC, is developed. Different from standard MASAC, the proposed method jointly incorporates Beta-policy-based bounded action modeling, adaptive entropy regulation, and delayed actor updates into the CTDE framework. This design enables the agents to learn node-association preferences, offloading ratios, and transmit-power decisions under dynamic link states, stochastic task arrivals, and shared edge-resource competition. These modules are not claimed to independently improve all performance metrics. Instead, they are designed as an integrated learning-stabilization mechanism, where the Beta policy provides bounded action representation, adaptive entropy tuning regulates exploration, and delayed actor updates improve late-stage training stability.
(4) Comparative experiments are conducted under a unified training budget and a consistent evaluation protocol. The results show that ABDMASAC achieves a better overall trade-off than the selected MASAC-backbone and on-policy MARL baselines in terms of system reward, end-to-end latency, and terminal-side energy consumption.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives the system model and problem formulation. Section 3 presents ABDMASAC. Section 4 reports experiments and ablations, and Section 5 concludes the paper.
1.1.1 Optimization-Based MEC Task Offloading
Optimization-based MEC studies have modeled offloading through power-delay tradeoffs, resource allocation, trajectory planning, dense-user interaction, task heterogeneity, and multi-objective scheduling. Representative works include Chen et al. [1], Mao et al. [2], Wu et al. [3], Yang et al. [4], Li et al. [5], Yao et al. [6], Gao et al. [7], Tong et al. [8], Han et al. [9], Misha et al. [10], and Yao and Chang [11]. Surveys by Mao et al. [12], Feng et al. [13], Kar et al. [14], Dong et al. [15], and Wang et al. [16] show that MEC offloading has evolved toward joint latency-energy-resource optimization, but many models still rely on simplified dynamics and coordination assumptions.
1.1.2 DRL-Based MEC Task Offloading
DRL has been used to improve adaptability when MEC states and constraints are difficult to optimize analytically. Surveys by Luo and Dai [17], Hortelano et al. [18], Zabihi et al. [19], Peng et al. [20], and Nabi et al. [21] summarize this trend. Representative studies include Tang and Wong [22], Mirza et al. [23], Liu et al. [24], Liu et al. [25], and Xie et al. [26]. More recently, Mustafa et al. [27] developed a Dueling-DQN-based method for partial computation offloading and resource allocation in MEC, further demonstrating the effectiveness of value-based DRL in jointly optimizing task partitioning and resource-control decisions. However, single-agent DRL is less suitable when multiple terminals jointly affect node load, delay, energy, and queue evolution.
1.1.3 MARL-Based Cooperative Offloading
MARL-based MEC offloading has considered communication-assisted coordination, UAV trajectory coupling, prioritized replay, and hybrid action spaces, as shown by Tan et al. [28], Ju et al. [29], Shi et al. [30], and Wang et al. [31]. The evolutionary-game-and-MATD3-based joint node-selection and task-offloading method of Yao et al. [32] further addresses UAV-assisted MEC with hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces. Chen et al. [33], Zuo et al. [34], Li et al. [35], and Bo and Zhao [36] extend MARL offloading to LEO, SAGIN, V2X, and vehicle-edge settings. These studies support cooperative learning, but bounded hybrid actions and stable CTDE training remain challenging under mobility, stochastic arrivals, and edge-resource contention.
1.1.4 Research Gap and Motivation
Existing studies usually emphasize discrete association, continuous resource control, or simplified coordination. The joint treatment of relaxed service-node association, bounded task partitioning and power control, time-varying links, stochastic arrivals, and shared edge-resource competition remains insufficient, motivating the proposed ABDMASAC framework under CTDE.
2 System Model and Problem Formulation
This section defines the dynamic MEC model and the cooperative offloading problem. Robot terminals in Fig. 1 are only an example; the formulation uses the general term “terminal”.

Figure 1: A representative mobile-terminal MEC scenario for cooperative task offloading.
Consider the heterogeneous MEC system in Fig. 1, with multiple mobile terminals, one MBS, and
Let the terminal set be defined as
The system evolves in region
Let the two-dimensional positions of terminal
Terminal mobility is modeled by the Gaussian random walk in Eq. (2):
where
The selected service option is
Let
Let the Euclidean distance between terminal
Here,
Let
An effective orthogonal uplink access model is used: concurrent uploads occupy orthogonal resource blocks or an effective allocated bandwidth, so co-channel inter-user interference is not explicitly modeled. Thus,
The uplink transmission rate from terminal
where
Accordingly, if the amount of offloaded task data of terminal
Assume that the task generated by terminal
Here,
Let
where
With offloading ratio
For local frequency
where
For offloaded data, let
This equal-share rule captures edge-resource contention. The model does not introduce a persistent server-side queue or explicit edge waiting time; backlog is tracked at the terminal side through
At slot
The mixed decisions are relaxed into the continuous action vector
The node-association gating vector is defined in Eq. (11):
Here,
Accordingly, the binary association indicator is defined in Eq. (13):
The gating vector is a continuous relaxation of discrete association. The argmax projection in Eq. (12) is used only during environment interaction and is not treated as differentiable. The policy is optimized in the relaxed continuous space, while the projected hard association is used to compute delay, energy, and queue evolution; hence the method is a relaxation-based hybrid-action policy learner.
Accordingly, the total end-to-end latency of terminal
and the corresponding terminal-side energy consumption is defined in Eq. (15):
The per-slot cost combines latency, energy, queue length, and overload:
where
The normalized terms are
where
At the system level, the average cost at slot
Accordingly, the long-term cooperative offloading objective can be formulated as Eq. (19):
where
The resulting problem is
The constraints specify binary one-option association, bounded continuous controls, queue evolution, and equal-share CPU allocation.
Because P1 couples binary association, bounded continuous control, stochastic transitions, and multiple agents, it is solved as a Dec-POMDP under CTDE.
The shared reward is the negative average cost:
Reward clipping is used for critic stability:
3 Cooperative Offloading Optimization Method Based on Improved MASAC
Following CTDE [37], P1 is formulated as a Dec-POMDP and solved by the proposed ABDMASAC algorithm.
Each terminal is an agent, and the agent set is
The global state
The local action
The transition probability is
which is driven by mobility, link switching, task arrivals, and shared edge-resource competition. The shared reward follows Eq. (21); maximizing its discounted return is equivalent to minimizing the cost in P1.
3.2 Improved Learning Framework Based on MASAC
ABDMASAC builds on SAC [38] and CTDE [37], and improves MASAC through bounded action modeling, adaptive entropy tuning, and delayed policy updates.
Under CTDE, each terminal executes its actor using only local observations, while centralized critics use global information and joint actions for training. Fig. 2 shows the framework.

Figure 2: Overall framework of the proposed ABDMASAC under centralized training and decentralized execution. The replay buffer stores the relaxed continuous joint action
Let the actor-network parameters of terminal
where
The replay buffer stores the relaxed continuous action vector, including gating, offloading ratio, and normalized power. Argmax-based hard association is used only by the environment, whereas the centralized critic uses the global state and relaxed joint action for value gradients.
Because gating variables, offloading ratio, and normalized power are bounded, ABDMASAC follows Chou et al. [40] and models each continuous action dimension with a Beta distribution.
The actor outputs
In the implementation, the actor network outputs two unconstrained vectors, which are transformed into positive Beta concentration parameters through the softplus function. To avoid numerical instability near degenerate Beta distributions, the concentration parameters are clipped to
For
where
The entropy-regularized actor objective is
ABDMASAC uses adaptive temperature
The temperature objective is
where
To reduce actor oscillation caused by transient critic errors, ABDMASAC adopts delayed policy updates inspired by Fujimoto et al. [39].
The actor is updated only every
here,
3.3 Network Update and Training Procedure
During interaction, each actor samples a bounded relaxed action from its Beta policy; the gating part is projected to a service option only for environment execution. The environment returns
The interaction sample is stored in the replay buffer as
Unless specified,
Mini-batches update the twin critics using soft Bellman targets and Huber loss. The learned value estimates the long-term cooperative objective containing latency, energy, and queue terms.
Actors and entropy coefficient
Algorithm 1 summarizes the complete training procedure of ABDMASAC under the CTDE framework.

4 Simulation Results and Analysis
This section compares ABDMASAC with MASAC and MAPPO in small- and large-scale MEC scenarios and reports an ablation study.
The testbed contains one MBS and multiple SBSs. The small-scale scenario uses

Two representative MARL baselines are selected in this study for a controlled comparison. MASAC is used as the direct backbone baseline because the proposed method is developed by improving the MASAC learning framework. This comparison helps evaluate whether the proposed bounded action modeling, adaptive entropy tuning, and delayed actor update can improve the original MASAC backbone under the same state representation, action parameterization, reward definition, training budget, and evaluation protocol. MAPPO is adopted as another representative on-policy MARL baseline based on a different policy-optimization paradigm.
It should be noted that the current comparison is not intended to serve as an exhaustive benchmark of all continuous-action or hybrid-action MARL algorithms for MEC. Recent hybrid-action MARL methods usually rely on different action decompositions, discrete-continuous coupling mechanisms, state definitions, and resource-allocation assumptions. Directly adapting these methods to the present relaxed-action CTDE environment would require additional redesign and implementation choices, which may introduce uncontrolled factors beyond the scope of this revision. Therefore, the experiments focus on a controlled comparison with the direct MASAC backbone and a representative on-policy MARL baseline. Broader comparisons with hybrid-action and continuous-action MARL methods under a unified MEC environment will be treated as an important direction for future work. Each method is trained for 50,000 steps, evaluated every 100 steps, and averaged over three seeds; Table 2 lists common settings.

Table 3 summarizes implementation details. SAC-based methods use decentralized actors and centralized twin critics under CTDE; ABDMASAC uses a Beta policy, whereas MASAC uses a tanh-squashed Gaussian policy. Other settings are kept identical unless specified.

Reward weights and target entropy are fixed across methods. The metrics are average return, end-to-end latency, energy consumption, and, for ablation, queue length.
4.2.1 Results in the Small-Scale Scenario
Fig. 3 shows that ABDMASAC obtains the best overall trade-off in the small-scale scenario. Its final return is about

Figure 3: Performance comparison in the small-scale scenario: (a) average return, (b) average end-to-end latency, and (c) average energy consumption. The light curves denote the raw evaluation trajectories, while the dark curves denote the smoothed trends.
4.2.2 Results in the Large-Scale Scenario
Fig. 4 shows a clearer advantage at larger scale. ABDMASAC reaches about

Figure 4: Performance comparison in the large-scale scenario: (a) average return, (b) average end-to-end latency, and (c) average energy consumption. The light curves denote the raw evaluation trajectories, while the dark curves denote the smoothed trends.
A reduced environment is used for ablation while retaining the main load and resource-competition pattern. Four variants are tested: Baseline (standard MASAC), Beta-only, Beta-adaptive, and Full (ABDMASAC). Table 4 lists their settings; means and standard deviations are reported over multiple seeds.

4.3.2 Ablation Results and Discussion
Figs. 5 and 6 show that Baseline obtains about

Figure 5: Training-stage metric trajectories of different ablation variants under the Ablation-XS setting: (a) reward, (b) energy, (c) latency, and (d) queue length.

Figure 6: Statistical comparison over the last 20 evaluation points in the late training stage.
This paper investigates cooperative task offloading in dynamic MEC networks under CTDE and proposes ABDMASAC, which integrates Beta-policy-based bounded action modeling, adaptive entropy regulation, and delayed policy updates. Under the considered simulation settings, ABDMASAC achieves a better overall trade-off than the selected MASAC-backbone and on-policy MARL baselines. The ablation results show that the modules are complementary but not independently monotonic: the Beta policy alone may degrade performance when exploration and update dynamics are not properly adjusted, whereas the full method benefits from coordinated integration. The current comparison is not an exhaustive benchmark of all hybrid-action or continuous-action MARL methods. Future work will consider broader MARL comparisons, heterogeneous tasks, dynamic bandwidth allocation, communication overhead, explicit edge-server queueing, and security- and privacy-aware offloading.
Acknowledgement: Not applicable.
Funding Statement: This work was supported by the Youth Talent Project of the Scientific Research Program of the Yunnan Key Research and Development Program under Grant 202503AP140020, the Major Science and Technology Special Project of Yunnan Province under Grant 202502AD080003, the Hubei Provincial Department of Education under Grant Q20241809, and the Doctoral Scientific Research Foundation of Hubei University of Automotive Technology under Grant BK202404.
Author Contributions: Zheng Yao and Changjun Deng: conceptualization. Zheng Yao, Jie Liu and Changjun Deng: data curation; investigation. Zheng Yao and Jie Liu: writing—original draft. Zheng Yao, Jie Liu, Changjun Deng, and Wang Lin: writing—review & editing. All authors reviewed and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Availability of Data and Materials: The data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Ethics Approval: Not applicable.
Conflicts of Interest: Changjun Deng and Wang Lin are affiliated with Yunnan Hanzhe Technology Co., Ltd. through the Yunnan International Joint Laboratory of Agricultural Remote Sensing and Digital Technology. This affiliation may be perceived as a potential conflict of interest. The authors declare that this affiliation did not influence the study design, data analysis, interpretation of results, manuscript preparation, or decision to publish. The remaining authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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Copyright © 2026 The Author(s). Published by Tech Science Press.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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