An End-to-End Load Balancer Based on Deep Learning for Vehicular Network Traffic Control

Abstract

The infrastructure to vehicle (I2V) communication boosts a large number of prevailing vehicular services, which can provide vehicles with external information, storage, and computing power located at both mobile edge server (MES) and remote cloud. However, vehicle distribution is imbalanced due to the spatial inhomogeneity and temporal dynamics. As a consequence, the communication load for MES is imbalanced and vehicles may suffer from poor I2V communications where the MES is overloaded. In this paper, we propose a novel proactively load balancing approach that enables efficient cooperation among MESs, which is referred to as end-to-end load balancer (E2LB). E2LB schedules the cached data among MESs based on the predicted road traffic situation. First, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is applied to efficiently learn the spatio-temporal correlation in order to predict the road traffic situation. Then, we formulate the load balancing problem as a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem and a novel framework based on CNN is adopted to approximate the NLP optimization. Finally, we connect the above neural networks into an end-to-end neural network to jointly optimize the performance, where the input is the historical traffic situation while the output is the balanced scheduling solution. E2LB can guarantee the real-time scheduling, since the calling of a well-trained neural network only requires a small number of simple operations. Experiments on the trajectories of taxis and buses in Beijing demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of E2LB.