Vehicular Edge Computing in Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Networks

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) supported by terrestrial networks can satisfy the necessities of multiple computation-intensive applications. However, current terrestrial networks and resource management mechanisms may only partially guarantee vehicle and in-vehicle user equipment (VUE)’s quality of service due to the limited coverage of roadside units (RSU), especially in remote areas. This paper investigates vehicular edge computing (VEC) in satellite-terrestrial integrated networks with multiple low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, ground RSUs, and VUEs. In remote areas without RSU coverage, VUEs can offload their partial tasks to satellites to save energy and guarantee latency. We aim to minimize VUEs’ weighted sum energy consumption by jointly optimizing VUEs’ association, data partition, computing resource allocation, power control, and bandwidth assignment under the constraints of maximum tolerant latency, maximum number of outage time slots, computation capacity at each satellite and each RSU, and maximum allowable transmission power at VUEs. Furthermore, we introduce an iterative algorithm by decomposing the original non-convex problem into several sub-problems. We efficiently solve each sub-problem by utilizing variable substitutions, the difference of convex functions algorithms, the Lagrangian dual method, and the Karush-Kuhn-Tucke conditions. Simulation results show that the introduced satellite-terrestrial integrated networks-enabled VEC scheme significantly reduces VUEs’ energy consumption compared to other schemes.