BARGAIN-MATCH: A Game Theoretical Approach for Resource Allocation and Task Offloading in Vehicular Edge Computing Networks

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is emerging as a promising architecture of vehicular networks (VNs) by deploying the cloud computing resources at the edge of the VNs. However, efficient resource management and task offloading in the VEC network is challenging. In this work, we first present a hierarchical framework that coordinates the heterogeneity among tasks and servers to improve the resource utilization for servers and service satisfaction for vehicles. Moreover, we formulate a joint resource allocation and task offloading problem (JRATOP), aiming to jointly optimize the intra-VEC server resource allocation and inter-VEC server load-balanced offloading by stimulating the horizontal and vertical collaboration among vehicles, VEC servers, and cloud server. Since the formulated JRATOP is NP-hard, we propose a cooperative resource allocation and task offloading algorithm named BARGAIN-MATCH, which consists of a bargaining-based incentive approach for intra-server resource allocation and a matching method-based horizontal-vertical collaboration approach for inter-server task offloading. Besides, BARGAIN-MATCH is proved to be stable, weak Pareto optimal, and polynomial complex. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior system utility and efficiency compared to the other methods, especially when the system workload is heavy.