Modeling Data Redundancy and Cost-Aware Task Allocation in MEC-Enabled Internet-of-Vehicles Applications

Abstract

Multiaccess edge computing (MEC) enables autonomous vehicles to handle time-critical and data-intensive computational tasks for emerging Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) applications via computation offloading. However, a massive amount of data generated by colocated vehicles is typically redundant, introducing a critical issue due to limited network bandwidth. Moreover, on the edge server side, these computation-intensive tasks further impose severe pressure on the resource-finite MEC server, resulting in low-performance efficiency of applications. To solve these challenges, we model the data redundancy and collaborative task computing scheme to efficiently reduce the redundant data and utilize the idle resources in nearby MEC servers. First, the data redundancy problem is formulated as a set-covering problem according to the spatiotemporal coverage of captured images. Next, we exploit the submodular optimization technique to design an efficient algorithm to minimize the number of images transferred to the MEC servers without degrading the quality of IoV applications. To facilitate the task execution in the MEC server, we then propose a collaborative task computing scheme, where an MEC server intentionally encourages nearby resource-rich MEC servers to participate in a collaborative computing group. Accordingly, a cost model is formulated as an optimization problem, the objective of which is to prompt the MEC server to judiciously allocate computing tasks to nearby MEC servers with the goal of achieving the minimal cost while the latency of tasks is guaranteed. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can efficiently mitigate data redundancy, conserve network bandwidth consumption, and achieve the lowest cost for processing tasks.