Ultra Reliable, Low Latency Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Wireless Communications with Edge Computing

Ultra reliable, low latency vehicle-to- infrastructure (V2I) communications is a key requirement for seamless operation of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in future smart cities. To this end, cellular small base stations (SBSs) with edge computing capabilities can reduce the end-to-end (E2E) service delay by processing requested tasks from AVs locally, without forwarding the tasks to a remote cloud server. Nonetheless, due to the limited computational capabilities of the SBSs, coupled with the scarcity of the wireless bandwidth resources, minimizing the E2E latency for AVs and achieving a reliable V2I network is challenging. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to jointly optimize AVs-to-SBSs association and bandwidth allocation to maximize the reliability of the V2I network. By using tools from labor matching markets, the proposed framework can effectively perform distributed association of AVs to SBSs, while accounting for the latency needs of AVs as well as the limited computational and bandwidth resources of SBSs. Moreover, the convergence of the proposed algorithm to a core allocation between AVs and SBSs is proved and its ability to capture interdependent computational and transmission latencies for AVs in a V2I network is characterized. Simulation results show that by optimizing the E2E latency, the proposed algorithm substantially outperforms conventional cell association schemes, in terms of service reliability and latency.