Joint Driving Mode Selection and Resource Management in Vehicular Edge Computing Networks

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have emerged as an efficient solution to improve the driving experience in the intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), in which the targeted vehicle (TV) can switch between the human-driven (HD) and autonomous-driven (AD) modes to act as server or terminal in vehicular edge computing networks (VECNs). However, due to the dynamic nature of traffic networks and the moving of vehicles, distribution of computational resources is imbalanced and variable, it is a challenge to design the cooperative resource management scheme for the whole journey of vehicle users. In this article, we propose a joint driving model selection and resource management scheme for TV in each road segment, to maximize the vehicle users' satisfaction of the whole journey. For the complex formulated joint optimization problem, we design a three-stage hierarchical optimization (3SHO) framework, using deep Q-network (DQN) for driving mode optimization in the first stage and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) for optimizing resource management under different selected driving modes. And a terminal-server matching mechanism is introduced to enable dynamic service quality improvement for TV. Specially, we design a new user satisfaction function with the quality of service, traffic revenue, and the gap between expected and actual revenues of users are considered. Experimental results showcase the robust convergence of the 3SHO algorithm, the adeptness to dynamic traffic networks, and the capacity to enhance user satisfaction significantly.