A dynamic pricing scheme for secure offloading and resource allocation based on the internet of vehicles

Abstract

With the development of sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication technology, billions of vehicles will access the network in the future, and the number of vehicle applications and user data will also increase dramatically. Traditional cloud computing faces serious problems of latency and energy consumption in handling massive data. Mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged to dramatically improve computing efficiency and reduce energy consumption by placing computing servers at network edge locations close to vehicles. However, the service range of MEC servers is limited and cannot fully satisfy user requirements. In addition, the task offloading process has security risks. The current research focuses on how to reduce the energy consumption and latency overhead of task offloading and neglects the economic cost or data transmission security of vehicles. To solve the above problems, we propose a cooperative security offloading (CSO) scheme for auxiliary vehicles and MEC servers. Firstly, we propose a dynamic pricing mechanism for computing resources by considering the credibility of MEC servers and auxiliary vehicles, the urgency of the task, and the number of users competing for auxiliary vehicles. Secondly, to prevent malicious MEC servers and eavesdroppers from attacking, we employ homomorphic encryption to protect user privacy. Meanwhile, efficient and secure computing services are achieved by optimizing user selection decisions, offloading decisions, and resource allocation decisions. Finally, the optimal decisions are obtained by the dueling DQN-based resource allocation and pricing strategy (DDRP) and the cost-minimizing security offloading (CMSO) algorithm, which minimizes the economic cost of users while maximizing security. Simulation results show that, compared with some existing schemes, the CSO scheme effectively reduces the economic cost of users while ensuring the security of data transmission.