Computation Placement Orchestrator for Mobile-Edge Computing in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks

The vision of heterogeneous vehicle networks (HetVNETs) embraces various highly dynamic scenarios with urgent requirements for delay-sensitive and reliability-guaranteed computation placement. Incorporating mobile-edge computing (MEC) technology into computation placement has a significant potential to reduce computational delay and enhance communication reliability. However, vehicle mobility and resource constraints make the multivehicle scramble for communication and computational resources challenging. This article intends to investigate collaborative computing by comprehensively considering vehicle mobility, channel condition, and computational resources with two goals: 1) high-reliability transmission (HRT) and 2) computational delay minimization (CDM). Specifically, we develop a hybrid MEC-enabled computation placement orchestrator for HetVNET, where the HRT and CDM are formulated as mixed-integer programming and nonconvex optimization problems, respectively. To ensure high-reliability communication, we leverage the conditional value at risk theory to tackle the nonsmooth HRT problem. To solve the CDM problem, we transform it into two subproblems: resource allocation and task offloading problems, aiming at reducing computational delay and improving resource utilization. Furthermore, we construct an iterative optimization algorithm to capture the optimal computation placement scheme in closed form for the HRT and CDM problems. Performance evaluations show that the proposed methods can significantly improve communication reliability and reduce computational delay.