Competitive and Cooperative Computation Offloading for Intensive Heterogeneous Tasks in Vehicular Edge Computing Networks

Computation offloading is widely used in vehicular edge computing (VEC) networks to satisfy the computational intensity and latency sensitivity requirements. However, many existing offloading algorithms do not comprehensively consider the dynamically changing characteristics of heterogeneous tasks within a roadside unit (RSU), resulting in tasks timeout and being dropped. In this paper, we design a competitive and cooperative computation offloading (C3O) model to reduce task execution latency. Specifically, when intensive heterogeneous tasks are generated, these vehicles jointly compete for the computing resource of a RSU, or they can also offload tasks to the task vehicle (TaV) with free computing resource. Meanwhile, We analyze the latency model of local execution and offloading to RSU or TaV execution and formulate a sequential task offloading decision problem, NP-hard. To address it, we propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm based on C3O (MARC3O) to intelligently determine the computation offloading policy for each vehicle according to the state of VEC networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce task execution latency and improve task completion rates compared with baseline schemes.