MobileEdge: Enhancing On-board Vehicle Computing Units using Mobile Edges for CAVs

As the rapid growth of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and 5G intensifies, more third-party applications are increasingly being deployed on CAVs. They not only improve user experience but also provide more helpful services, for example, enhancing public safety by recognizing criminals in real-time videos. Current CAVs prefer to process collected data on the vehicle to avoid long transmission latency and extra network cost. However, due to the limitations of the on-board vehicle computing unit (VCU) and increasing use of computing-intensive in-vehicle applications, the burden of on-board VCU has sharply increased, which may affect driving safety. In particular, for existing vehicles on the road, adding more computing devices is a challenge if not impossible due to cost concerns. Inspired by edge computing, we propose a novel platform, MobileEdge, to enhance the computing capability of the unchangeable on-board VCU, which leverages mobile devices as edge nodes, e.g., the passengers' smartphones, by offloading computing tasks to them for collaboratively computing. Moreover, MobileEdge provides the dynamic management of mobile devices, monitoring device status and interfaces for customizable task offloading strategies and eventually achieves optimal task scheduling. We build a prototype to demonstrate the designed platform and evaluate three task offloading strategies which were implemented based on the developed interfaces. The results show that MobileEdge significantly reduces the application response latency. Compared with the baseline which does not employ task offloading, the response latency is almost near real-time when more computing resources are available. In addition, the proposed shortest response latency strategy outperforms the best overall task scheduling among the three strategies.