Computation Offloading for Vehicular Environments: A Survey

With significant advances in communication and computing, modern day vehicles are becoming increasingly intelligent. This gives them the ability to contribute to safer roads and passenger comfort through network devices, cameras, sensors, and computational storage and processing capabilities. However, to run new and popular applications, and to enable vehicles operating autonomously requires massive computational resources. Computational resources available with the current day vehicles are not sufficient to process all these demands. In this situation, other vehicles, edge servers, and servers in remote data centers can help the vehicles by lending their computing resources. However, to take advantage of these computing resources, computation offloading techniques have to be leveraged to transfer tasks or entire applications to run on other devices. Such computation offloading can lead to improved performance and Quality of Service (QoS) for applications and for the network. However, computation offloading in a highly dynamic environment such as vehicular networks is a major challenge. Therefore, this survey aims to review and organize the computation offloading literature in vehicular environments. In addition, we demystify some concepts, propose a taxonomy with the most important aspects and classify most works in the area according to each category. We also present the main tools, scenarios, subjects, strategies, objectives, etc., used in the works. Finally, we present the main challenges and future directions to guide future research in this active research area.