Dynamic Offloading Method for Mobile Edge Computing of Internet of Vehicles Based on Multi-Vehicle Users and Multi-MEC Servers

Abstract

With the continuous development of intelligent transportation system technology, vehicle users have higher and higher requirements for low latency and high service quality of task computing. The computing offloading technology of mobile edge computing (MEC) has received extensive attention in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) architecture. However, due to the limited resources of the MEC server, it cannot meet the task requests from multiple vehicle users simultaneously. For this reason, making correct and fast offloading decisions to provide users with a service with low latency, low energy consumption, and low cost is still a considerable challenge. Regarding the issue above, in the IoV environment where vehicle users race, this paper designs a three-layer system task offloading overhead model based on the Edge-Cloud collaboration of multiple vehicle users and multiple MEC servers. To solve the problem of minimizing the total cost of the system performing tasks, an Edge-Cloud collaborative, dynamic computation offloading method (ECDDPG) based on a deep deterministic policy gradient is designed. This method is deployed at the edge service layer to make fast offloading decisions for tasks generated by vehicle users. The simulation results show that the performance is better than the Deep Q-network (DQN) method and the Actor-Critic method regarding reward value and convergence. In the face of the change in wireless channel bandwidth and the number of vehicle users, compared with the basic method strategy, the proposed method has better performance in reducing the total computational cost, computing delay, and energy consumption. At the same time, the computational complexity of the system execution tasks is significantly reduced.