UAV-Assisted Task Offloading in Vehicular Edge Computing Networks

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) provides an effective task offloading paradigm by pushing cloud resources to the vehicular network edges, e.g., road side units (RSUs). However, overloaded RSUs are likely to occur especially in urban aggregation areas, possibly leading to greatly compromised offloading performance. Inspired by this, this article explores this situation by introducing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to address the VEC overload problem. Specifically, we formulate a novel online UAV-assisted vehicular task offloading problem to minimize vehicular task delay under the long-term UAV energy constraint. To solve the formulated problem, we first decouple the long-term energy constraint based on the Lyapunov optimization technique. In this way, the problem can be solved in a real-time manner without requiring future information. Then, we construct a Markov chain based on Markov approximation optimization to find out the close-to-optimal UAV-assisted offloading strategies. Furthermore, we derive a mathematical analysis to rigorously demonstrate the offloading performance of the proposed algorithm. Additionally, the simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the baselines by significantly reducing the vehicular task delay constrained by the long-term UAV energy budget under various system parameters, such as the energy budget and computation workloads.