Energy-efficient offloading decision-making for mobile edge computing in vehicular networks

Driven by the explosion transmission and computation requirement in 5G vehicular networks, mobile edge computing (MEC) attracts more attention than centralized cloud computing. The advantage of MEC is to provide a large amount of computation and storage resources to the edge of networks so as to offload computation-intensive and delay-sensitive applications from vehicle terminals. However, according to the mobility of vehicle terminals and the time varying traffic load, the optimal task offloading decisions is crucial. In this paper, we consider the uplink transmission from vehicles to road side units in the vehicular network. A dynamic task offloading decision for flexible subtasks is proposed to minimize the utility, which includes energy consumption and packet drop rate. Furthermore, a computation resource allocation scheme is introduced to allocate the computation resources of MEC server due to the differences in the computation intensity and the transmission queue of each vehicle. Consequently, a Lyapunov-based dynamic offloading decision algorithm is proposed, which combines the dynamic task offloading decision and computation resource allocation, to minimize the utility function while ensuring the stability of the queue. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm could achieve a significant improvement in the utility of vehicular networks compared with comparison algorithms.