Quality of Service Optimization for Vehicular Edge Computing with Solar-Powered Road Side Units

This paper shows the viability of Solar-powered Road Side Units (SRSU), consisting of small cell base stations and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers, and powered solely by solar panels with battery, to provide connected vehicles with a low- latency, easy-to-deploy and energy-efficient communication and edge computing infrastructure. However, SRSU may entail a high risk of power deficiency, leading to severe Quality of Service (QoS) loss due to spatial and temporal fluctuation of solar power generation. Meanwhile, the data traffic demand also varies with space and time. The mismatch between solar power generation and SRSU power consumption makes optimal use of solar power challenging. In this paper, we model the above problem with three sub-problems, the SRSU power consumption minimization problem, the temporal energy balancing problem and spatial energy balancing problem. Three algorithms are proposed to solve the above sub-problems, and they together provide a complete joint battery charging and user association control algorithm to minimize the QoS loss under delay constraint of the computing tasks. Results with a simulated urban environment using actual solar irradiance and vehicular traffic data demonstrates that the proposed solution reduces the QoS loss significantly compared to greedy approaches.