Blockchain-Based Cooperative Computation Offloading and Secure Handover in Vehicular Edge Computing Networks

Facing the requirements of intelligent vehicles for massive data processing, vehicular edge computing (VEC) utilizes computing resources deployed on the roadside infrastructure to provide proximity computing services for vehicles and forms a novel computing paradigm. Thus, vehicles can reduce the burden of local computing and improve computing efficiency by offloading tasks to roadside computing servers or neighboring resource-idle vehicles for execution via cooperative computation offloading (CO). However, dynamic communication channel states and data handover among multiple VEC servers caused by vehicle mobility pose challenges for CO decision-making and data security. This article applies blockchain to the cooperative CO of VEC and thus proposes a cooperative CO and secure handover framework with a consensus mechanism to guarantee the efficiency of cooperative CO and secure handover. In this framework, models for vehicle mobility and cooperative CO handover are constructed, and a consensus mechanism is proposed. This mechanism ensures the synchronization and immutability of offloaded data in the CO handover. A cooperative CO decision optimization is also formulated considering secure handover with blockchain technology to optimize the latency of vehicular computing tasks. To solve this complex problem, this optimization is transformed into a Markov decision process and a cooperative CO decision algorithm with multiagent deep reinforcement learning is designed, thus achieving the optimal solution. Extensive simulations verified the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Automated summary

In response to the data processing needs of intelligent vehicles, vehicular edge computing (VEC) uses roadside computing resources to provide proximity computing services for vehicles, forming a new computing paradigm. This article proposes a cooperative computation offloading (CO) and secure handover framework utilizing blockchain technology to ensure efficient and secure CO. The framework includes models for vehicle mobility and CO handover, along with a consensus mechanism for data synchronization and immutability. A cooperative CO decision optimization is formulated and solved using multiagent deep reinforcement learning. Extensive simulations validate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method.