Cooperative Task Scheduling for Computation Offloading in Vehicular Cloud

Technological evolutions in the automobile industry, especially the development of connected and autonomous vehicles, have granted vehicles more computing, storage, and sensing resources. The necessity of efficient utilization of these resources leads to the vision of vehicular cloud computing (VCC), which can offload the computing tasks from the edge or remote cloud to enhance the overall efficiency. In this paper, we study the problem of computation offloading through the vehicular cloud (VC), where computing missions from edge cloud can be offloaded and executed cooperatively by vehicles in VC. Specifically, computing missions are further divided into computing tasks with interdependency and executed in different vehicles in the VC to minimize the overall response time. To characterize the instability of computing resources resulting from the high vehicular mobility, a mobility model focusing on vehicular dwell time is utilized. Considering the heterogeneity of vehicular computing capabilities and the interdependency of computing tasks, we formulate an optimization problem for task scheduling, which is NP-hard. For low complexity, a modified genetic algorithm based scheduling scheme is designed where integer coding is used rather than binary coding, and relatives are defined and employed to avoid infeasible solutions. In addition, a task load based stability analysis of the VCC system is presented for the cases where some vehicles within the VC are offline. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the utilization of computing resources while guaranteeing low latency and system stability.