Digital Twin-Driven Vehicular Task Offloading and IRS Configuration in the Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

Digital mymargin Twin (DT) and Intelligent Reflective Surface (IRS), the most two promising technologies of 6G make the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) more adaptive. However, future autonomous driving needs powerful networking resources and high-quality wireless communications to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS). Especially considering the time-varying physical operating environments of IoV, it is extremely urgent to improve resource utilization and wireless channel quality. In this work, we propose a Digital Twin-Driven Vehicular Task Offloading and IRS Configuration Framework (DTVIF) to efficiently monitor, learn, and manage the IoV. Specifically, we adopt Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and IRS to provide augmented computing capacities for vehicles and improve transmission performance when vehicles communicate to MEC servers. DT is employed to achieve real-time data collection and digital representation of physical operating environments of IoV to better support decisions making. In order to reduce the overall delay and energy consumption of DTVIF, we propose a Two-Stage Optimization for Jointly Optimizing Task Offloading and IRS Configuration (TSJTI) algorithm based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Transfer Learning (TFL). In the first stage, we introduce Double Deep <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -learning Networks (DDQN) to find the optimal offloading decision. In the second stage, based on the parameters learned from the first stage, we migrate the parameters from the first stage to find the optimal IRS configuration based on the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) method. The simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the processing latency of task offloading and reduce the average energy consumption in DTVIF.