A Game-Theoretic Approach to Computation Offloading in Software-Defined D2D-Enabled Vehicular Networks

The incipient vehicular applications and the explosive growth of data generally led to the increase in demand for communication, computation, and storage resources, as well as the stringent performance requirement on latency and wireless network capacity. To address these challenges, Vehicular Edge Computing is an envisioned promising solution that extends the computation capability to the edge of the vehicular network and computation offloading service is provided in the proximity of the vehicles. Vehicular edge computing (VEC) and D2D communication have been designed to benefit from proximity gain to optimize computation offloading. Software-defined network (SDN) inside the vehicular network (SDVN) is developed in this article to rectify most problems in the vehicular network. Besides, the SDVN controller handles D2D pairing of vehicles and co-ordinates with the edge cloud for flexible allocation of computing resources among vehicles and mobile users. In this article, we combine D2D communication and VEC to further enhance the computation capacity of the vehicular network. Our goal is to optimize the number of devices the vehicular network can support under communication and computational limitation. We formulate the task offloading and associated resource allocation problem as a game with mixed strategies. The players involved in the game are the SDN controller handling the computation resource allocation at the network edge and a vehicle deciding on task offloading. The existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium are theoretically proved.