Fairness-Aware Budgeted Edge Server Placement for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Mobile edge computing (MEC) considerably enhances the capabilities and performance of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) by deploying edge servers (ESs) on roadside units (RSUs) near CAVs, thereby ensuring low-latency services. Given the constrained and costly nature of ES resources (computing, storage, and bandwidth), equitable ES utilization is critical for CAV operations. However, fairness considerations are often overlooked in current budgeted edge server placement (ESP) strategies, potentially worsening resource imbalances and compromising user experience. This paper investigates the fairness-aware budgeted edge server placement (FESP) problem within RSUs, proving its NP-hardness. To address FESP, we first propose FESP-O, an integer programming-based optimal approach for small-scale problems, followed by FESP-APX, an approximation approach for large-scale scenarios that provides near-optimal solutions. We analyze the time complexity and approximation ratio of our proposed algorithms and validate their efficacy through experiments on real-world datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements over baseline and state-of-the-art methods, indicating practical suitability and efficiency.