TBOMC: A Task-Block-Based Overlapping Matching-Coalition Scheme for Task Offloading in Vehicular Fog Computing

Vehicular fog computing (VFC) is regarded as a promising framework for vehicular computing applications by utilizing local spare resources of nearby vehicles to conduct ubiquitous time-critical and data-intensive tasks. Meanwhile, how to provide stable and low-latency services through real-time task offloading has become a heated issue. Opposite to the traditional task-to-individual offloading manner, in this article, we propose a novel task-block (TB)-based offloading paradigm for VFC, in which the tasks are merged into blocks to be assigned and offloaded. This TB-based offloading paradigm effectively alleviates the offloading decision-making burden and, thus, reduces the overall computation latency in the dynamic vehicular environment. Faced with transmission-reliable and time-intensive requirements of TBs, we turn to cooperation among vehicles and further propose a TB-based overlapping matching-coalition (TBOMC) scheme integrating overlapping coalition formation (OCF) game with matching theory to address the complicated offloading problem. The OCF game framework encourages vehicular fog nodes to devote their resources and form collaborative computing groups in a distributed method. Numerical results demonstrate that the TBOMC scheme better exploits local computing capabilities and outperforms from 5% to 12% over other existing benchmarks.