A Multi-Hop VANETs-Assisted Offloading Strategy in Vehicular Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a suitable solution to improve computational capabilities in vehicular environments, and the computation offloading plays a critical role in MEC. After the computation task generates, in traditional offloading strategies, vehicles offload data only when they have entered the communication range of the MEC server, which greatly increases the time cost and cannot satisfy the delay requirement of certain applications in many cases. To deploy a large number of MEC servers for full coverage of roads is not a realistic solution due to its high construction cost. In this paper, we make full use of the multi-hop vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to assist in computation offloading of vehicles. In the real-time traffic environment, based on the link correlation theory in VANETs, the reliability model of multi-hop routing path is built. Meeting the delay constraints, the optimal offloading strategy with the lowest relaying and computing cost is executed by the binary search algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed multi-hop VANETs-assisted offloading strategy (MHVA) shows better performance in offloading delay and cost than existing typical strategies under various environments.