V2X offloading and resource allocation in SDN-assisted MEC-based vehicular networks

Abstract

As an important application scenario of 5G, the vehicular network has a huge amount of computing data, which brings challenges to the scarce network resources. Mobile edge computing (MEC) sinks cloud services to the edge of network, which reduces the delay jitter caused by remote cloud computing. Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging network paradigm with the features of logic centralized control and programmability. In this paper, we construct an SDN-assisted MEC network architecture for the vehicular network. By introducing SDN controller, the efficiency and flexibility of vehicular network are improved, and the network state can be perceived from the global perspective. To further reduce the system overhead, the problem of vehicle to everything (V2X) offloading and resource allocation is proposed, where the optimal offloading decision, transmission power control, subchannels assignment, and computing resource allocation scheme are given. The optimization problem is transformed into three stages because of the heterogeneity of the offloaded tasks and the NP-hard property of the problem. Firstly, the analytic hierarchy process is used to select initial offloading node, then stateless Q-learning is adopted to allocate transmission power, subchannels and computing resources. In addition, the offloading decision is modeled as a potential game, and the Nash equilibrium is proved by the potential function construction. Finally, the numerical results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively reduce the system overhead and achieve better results compared with others' algorithms.