A Truthful Reverse-Auction Mechanism for Computation Offloading in Cloud-Enabled Vehicular Network

Abstract

The growth of smart vehicles and computation-intensive applications poses new challenges in providing reliable and efficient vehicular services. Offloading such applications from vehicles to mobile edge cloud servers has been considered as a remedy, although resource limitations and coverage constraints of the cloud service may still result in unsatisfactory performance. Recent studies have shown that exploiting the unused resources of nearby vehicles for application execution can augment the computational capabilities of application owners while alleviating heavy on-board workloads. However, encouraging vehicles to share resources or execute applications for others remains a sensitive issue due to user selfishness. To address this issue, we establish a novel computation offloading marketplace in vehicular networks where a Vickrey–Clarke–Groves based reverse auction mechanism utilizing integer linear programming (ILP) problem is formulated while satisfying the desirable economical properties of truthfulness and individual rationality. As ILP has high computation complexity which brings difficulties in implementation under larger and fast changing network topologies, we further develop an efficient unilateral-matching-based mechanism, which offers satisfactory suboptimal solutions with polynomial computational complexity, truthfulness and individual rationality properties as well as matching stability. Simulation results show that, as compared with baseline methods, the proposed unilateral-matching-based mechanism can greatly improve the system efficiency of vehicular networks in all traffic scenarios.