A Task Oriented Computation Offloading Algorithm for Intelligent Vehicle Network With Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

With the rise of intelligent and connected vehicles (ICVs), new vehicle applications continue to emerge, while the computing capability of vehicles remains limited. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is considered to be the most effective technique for mitigating vehicle computing pressure, with computation offloading being a key technology for MEC. To solve the problem of excessive task processing delay and energy consumption due to the vehicle-limited computing power in the vehicular network, we consider the tasks and the characteristics of MEC, and divide the tasks into indivisible tasks and divisible tasks according to the size of data (that is, whether it affects functionality after segmentation). Then, two computation offloading algorithms are proposed named binary offloading and partial offloading separately. The binary offloading unloads the task to the mobile edge computing server as a whole and selects only an optimal offloading site; thus, an improved upper confidence bound algorithm is adopted. The partial offloading divides the complex tasks with large data volumes through time slots processed by different MEC servers, and uses the Q-learning algorithm to find the most effective offloading strategy. The simulation results show that the total cost of delay and energy consumption of the binary offloading algorithm is lower when processing computationally intensive tasks. When addressing divisible and complex tasks, the partial offloading algorithm improves the real-time performance of the tasks significantly and conserves the energy of the vehicle terminal.