Optimizing UAV-Assisted Vehicular Edge Computing With Age of Information: An SAC-Based Solution

Edge computing improves the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) by offloading heavy computations from in-vehicle devices to high-capacity edge servers, typically roadside units (RSUs), to ensure rapid response times for intensive and latency-sensitive tasks. However, maintaining Quality of Service (QoS) remains challenging in dense urban settings and remote areas with limited infrastructure. To address this, we propose an software-defined networking (SDN)-driven model for uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted vehicular edge computing (VEC), integrating RSUs and UAVs to provide computing services and gather global network data via an SDN controller. UAVs serve as adaptable platforms for mobile-edge computing (MEC), filling gaps left by traditional MEC frameworks in areas with high vehicle density or sparse network resources. An optimal offloading mechanism, designed to minimize the Age of Information (AoI) while balancing energy consumption and rental costs, is implemented through a soft actor-critic (SAC)-based algorithm that jointly optimizes UAV trajectory, user association, and offloading decisions. Experimental results demonstrate the model's superior performance, achieving up to 87.2% energy savings in energy-limited settings and a 50% reduction in time-sensitive scenarios, consistently outperforming traditional strategies across various task sizes.