Traffic-Aware Task Offloading Based on Convergence of Communication and Sensing in Vehicular Edge Computing

With the explosive growth of computation-intensive and latency-sensitive vehicular applications, limited on-board computing resources can hardly satisfy these heterogeneous requirements and task offloading becomes a potential solution. However, task offloading in vehicular networks may face the dilemma of unaffordable uploading time caused by the huge amount of uploading traffic. Therefore, considering the applications which use the environmental data as their input, the sensing abilities of serving nodes (SNs) are exploited and a traffic-aware task offloading (TATO) mechanism based on convergence of communication and sensing is proposed. In the TATO mechanism, a task vehicle can adaptively upload the input data to some SNs and transmit the computation instructions to others which use the environmental data sensed by themselves as input. The objective is to minimize the overall response time (ORT) by jointly optimizing the task and wireless bandwidth ratios. Next, a binary search and feasibility check (BSFC) algorithm is designed to solve the optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BSFC algorithm and show that the TATO mechanism always outperforms the benchmark mechanisms (i.e., communication-based offloading and sensing-based offloading) in terms of the ORT. Specifically, when the task offloading traffic is huge and the wireless transmission capability becomes a bottleneck, TATO can reduce the ORT by 42.8% compared with that of the communication-based offloading.