TD3-Sched: Learning to Orchestrate Container-based Cloud-Edge Resources via Distributed Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Resource scheduling in cloud-edge systems is challenging as edge nodes run latency-sensitive workloads under tight resource constraints, while existing centralized schedulers can suffer from performance bottlenecks and user experience degradation. To address the issues of distributed decisions in cloud-edge environments, we present TD3-Sched, a distributed reinforcement learning (DRL) scheduler based on Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) for continuous control of CPU and memory allocation, which can achieve optimized decisions for resource provisioning under dynamic workloads. On a realistic cloud-edge testbed with SockShop application and Alibaba traces, TD3-Sched achieves reductions of 17.9% to 38.6% in latency under same loads compared with other reinforcement-learning and rule-based baselines, and 16% to 31.6% under high loads. TD3-Sched also shows superior Service Level Objective (SLO) compliance with only 0.47% violations. These results indicate faster convergence, lower latency, and more stable performance while preserving service quality in container-based cloud-edge environment compared with the baselines.