Joint Offloading and IEEE 802.11p-Based Contention Control in Vehicular Edge Computing

One key element towards improving network performance with lower computing latency and better quality of service in vehicular edge computing (VEC) is offloading, which allows computation-intensive mobile applications to offload their tasks to VEC servers. In vehicular ad-hoc networks, VEC can offload the computation tasks to the road-side unit (RSU), which improves vehicular service and reduces energy consumption of the vehicle. In this letter, we investigate the impact of transmission time between vehicles and RSUs, which significantly impacts the offloading decision. In particular, due to the high mobility topology and IEEE 802.11p medium access control protocol, we propose an algorithm design of joint contention window control and offloading decision formulated as a mixed-integer non-linear problem to maximize system utility. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms benchmark policies in terms of the total processing completion time.