Stackelberg game-based task offloading in vehicular edge computing networks

With the emergence of intelligent vehicles, how to satisfy the demands of the vehicles with computing-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks has become a challenging issue. Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is proposed as an advanced paradigm to improve the service of vehicles through offloading the task to the VEC servers. Nevertheless, VEC servers always have limited computation resources and do not satisfy the offloading requirements of vehicles. To this end, in this paper, we propose a more flexible offloading scheme by jointly considering the offloading strategies and the price strategy. In the proposed scheme, where the task can be dynamically divided into two parts parallel executed at the vehicles and VEC servers. A multi-leader and multi-follower Stackelberg game -based distributed algorithm is proposed to maximize the utilities of the vehicles and the VEC servers under the delay constraint. Finally, the game equilibrium is analyzed and achieved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed offloading scheme converges fast and always outperforms the existing schemes in terms of the vehicular utility under different network conditions. For instance, the proposed scheme achieves the utility improvement over 56.62% compared to the fixed selection strategy and achieves the utility improvement up to 161.0% compared to the complete offloading with fixed price strategy when the number of vehicles is 10. Additionally, the effects of key parameters such as the offloading strategies and, the price strategy, and the computation resource on the average utility of vehicles are also discussed and analyzed based on the simulation results.