An online mechanism for resource provisioning and allocation in vehicle computing

Intelligent vehicles, serve as vehicle computing platforms and offer computing resources and sensing resources to users. With the consideration of online processing in practical systems, such as the dynamic arrival and departure of users and vehicles, the problem of online resource provisioning and allocation in vehicle computing (RPAVC) is addressed. Two categories of online computing are considered: online computing in the user's areas and user-specified areas. The novel is that a new online model for resource provisioning and allocation is proposed. The RPAVC problem is formulated as an auction-based setting to provide flexible service and the goal is to maximize social welfare. An offline truthful optimal mechanism and an online greedy mechanism are proposed to solve the RPAVC problem. The proposed online mechanism is truthful; that is, it drives the system into an equilibrium where users have no incentives to declare untrue valuations. Theoretical analyses show that the proposed online mechanism achieves individual rationality and consumer sovereignty. Furthermore, the approximation ratio of the allocation algorithm is analyzed. The results demonstrate that the proposed online mechanism performs well and that the minimum and maximum average gaps between solutions obtained by the proposed mechanism and the optimal solution are 4% and 21%, respectively.