Ahmad Zia¹, Nazia Azim², Bekarystankyzy Akbayan³, Khalid J. Alzahrani⁴, Ateeq Ur Rehman^5,*, Faheem Ullah Khan⁶, Nouf Al-Kahtani⁷, Hend Khalid Alkahtani^8,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.073818 - 12 January 2026

Abstract The cloud-fog computing paradigm has emerged as a novel hybrid computing model that integrates computational resources at both fog nodes and cloud servers to address the challenges posed by dynamic and heterogeneous computing networks. Finding an optimal computational resource for task offloading and then executing efficiently is a critical issue to achieve a trade-off between energy consumption and transmission delay. In this network, the task processed at fog nodes reduces transmission delay. Still, it increases energy consumption, while routing tasks to the cloud server saves energy at the cost of higher communication delay. Moreover, the… More >

Yonghua Huo^1,2, Ying Liu^1,*, Anni Jiang³, Yang Yang³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072681 - 12 January 2026

Abstract With the advent of sixth-generation mobile communications (6G), space–air–ground integrated networks have become mainstream. This paper focuses on collaborative scheduling for mobile edge computing (MEC) under a three-tier heterogeneous architecture composed of mobile devices, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and macro base stations (BSs). This scenario typically faces fast channel fading, dynamic computational loads, and energy constraints, whereas classical queuing-theoretic or convex-optimization approaches struggle to yield robust solutions in highly dynamic settings. To address this issue, we formulate a multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) for an air–ground-fused MEC system, unify link selection, bandwidth/power allocation, and task… More >

Sai Xu^1,*, Jun Liu^1,*, Shengyu Huang¹, Zhi Li²

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.071865 - 12 January 2026

Abstract In scenarios where ground-based cloud computing infrastructure is unavailable, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) act as mobile edge computing (MEC) servers to provide on-demand computation services for ground terminals. To address the challenge of jointly optimizing task scheduling and UAV trajectory under limited resources and high mobility of UAVs, this paper presents PER-MATD3, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm with prioritized experience replay (PER) into the Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) framework. Specifically, PER-MATD3 enables each agent to learn a decentralized policy using only local observations during execution, while leveraging a shared replay buffer with More >

Zheyuan Jia, Fenglin Jin^*, Jun Xie, Yuan He

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.1, pp. 1-15, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.069128 - 10 November 2025

Abstract This paper investigates the traffic offloading optimization challenge in Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks (SAGIN) through a novel Recursive Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (RMAPPO) algorithm. The exponential growth of mobile devices and data traffic has substantially increased network congestion, particularly in urban areas and regions with limited terrestrial infrastructure. Our approach jointly optimizes unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trajectories and satellite-assisted offloading strategies to simultaneously maximize data throughput, minimize energy consumption, and maintain equitable resource distribution. The proposed RMAPPO framework incorporates recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model temporal dependencies in UAV mobility patterns and utilizes a decentralized multi-agent More >

Lincong Zhang¹, Yuqing Liu¹, Kefeng Wei², Weinan Zhao¹, Bo Qian^1,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.1, pp. 1-18, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.069108 - 10 November 2025

Abstract In the field of edge computing, achieving low-latency computational task offloading with limited resources is a critical research challenge, particularly in resource-constrained and latency-sensitive vehicular network environments where rapid response is mandatory for safety-critical applications. In scenarios where edge servers are sparsely deployed, the lack of coordination and information sharing often leads to load imbalance, thereby increasing system latency. Furthermore, in regions without edge server coverage, tasks must be processed locally, which further exacerbates latency issues. To address these challenges, we propose a novel and efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based approach aimed at minimizing average… More >

Junjun Ren¹, Guoqiang Chen², Zheng-Yi Chai³, Dong Yuan^4,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.1, pp. 1-26, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.068795 - 10 November 2025

Abstract Vehicle Edge Computing (VEC) and Cloud Computing (CC) significantly enhance the processing efficiency of delay-sensitive and computation-intensive applications by offloading compute-intensive tasks from resource-constrained onboard devices to nearby Roadside Unit (RSU), thereby achieving lower delay and energy consumption. However, due to the limited storage capacity and energy budget of RSUs, it is challenging to meet the demands of the highly dynamic Internet of Vehicles (IoV) environment. Therefore, determining reasonable service caching and computation offloading strategies is crucial. To address this, this paper proposes a joint service caching scheme for cloud-edge collaborative IoV computation offloading. By… More >

Zheng Yao^*, Puqing Chang

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.1, pp. 1-18, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.068248 - 10 November 2025

Abstract As Internet of Things (IoT) applications expand, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising architecture to overcome the real-time processing limitations of mobile devices. Edge-side computation offloading plays a pivotal role in MEC performance but remains challenging due to complex task topologies, conflicting objectives, and limited resources. This paper addresses high-dimensional multi-objective offloading for serial heterogeneous tasks in MEC. We jointly consider task heterogeneity, high-dimensional objectives, and flexible resource scheduling, modeling the problem as a Many-objective optimization. To solve it, we propose a flexible framework integrating an improved cooperative co-evolutionary algorithm based on More >

Xianwei Li^1,2, Bo Wei^3,4, Xiaoying Yang^5,6,*, Amr Tolba⁷, Zijian Zeng⁸, Osama Alfarraj^7,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.85, No.2, pp. 3437-3455, 2025, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.067200 - 23 September 2025

Abstract With the advancements of the next-generation communication networking and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, a variety of computation-intensive applications (e.g., autonomous driving and face recognition) have emerged. The execution of these IoT applications demands a lot of computing resources. Nevertheless, terminal devices (TDs) usually do not have sufficient computing resources to process these applications. Offloading IoT applications to be processed by mobile edge computing (MEC) servers with more computing resources provides a promising way to address this issue. While a significant number of works have studied task offloading, only a few of them have considered More >

Qian Wang¹, Ya Zhou^1,2,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.84, No.2, pp. 3835-3856, 2025, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.065465 - 03 July 2025

Abstract Edge computing has transformed smart grids by lowering latency, reducing network congestion, and enabling real-time decision-making. Nevertheless, devising an optimal task-offloading strategy remains challenging, as it must jointly minimise energy consumption and response time under fluctuating workloads and volatile network conditions. We cast the offloading problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and solve it with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Specifically, we present a three-tier architecture—end devices, edge nodes, and a cloud server—and enhance Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to learn adaptive, energy-aware policies. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) extracts high-level features from system states, enabling More >

Yiwei Zhang, Xin Cui^*, Qinghui Zhao

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.84, No.2, pp. 2355-2373, 2025, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.065430 - 03 July 2025

Abstract The rapid advance of Connected-Automated Vehicles (CAVs) has led to the emergence of diverse delay-sensitive and energy-constrained vehicular applications. Given the high dynamics of vehicular networks, unmanned aerial vehicles-assisted mobile edge computing (UAV-MEC) has gained attention in providing computing resources to vehicles and optimizing system costs. We model the computing offloading problem as a multi-objective optimization challenge aimed at minimizing both task processing delay and energy consumption. We propose a three-stage hybrid offloading scheme called Dynamic Vehicle Clustering Game-based Multi-objective Whale Optimization Algorithm (DVCG-MWOA) to address this problem. A novel dynamic clustering algorithm is designed… More >