Adaptive Computing Scheduling for Edge-Assisted Autonomous Driving

This paper investigates computing resource scheduling for real-time applications in autonomous driving, such as localization and obstacle avoidance. In our considered scenario, autonomous vehicles periodically sense the environment, offload sensor data to an edge server for processing, and receive computing results from the server. Due to mobility and computing latency, a vehicle travels some distance in the duration between the instant of offloading its sensor data and the instant of receiving the computing result. Our objective is finding a scheduling scheme for the edge sever to minimize the above traveled distance of vehicles. The approach is to determine the processing order according to individual vehicle mobility and computing capability of the edge server. We formulate a restless multi-arm bandit (RMAB) problem, design a Whittle index based stochastic scheduling scheme, and determine the index using a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method. The proposed scheduling scheme avoids the time-consuming policy exploration common in DRL scheduling approaches and makes effectual decisions with low complexity. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed indexed-based scheme can deliver computing results to the vehicles promptly while adapting to time-variant vehicle mobility.