Stackelberg Game Based Computation Offloading in Vehicular Networks

In the vehicular networks, the application of mobile edge computing (MEC) technology can assist road mobile vehicles to efficiently perform task computation and offloading services. From the perspective of the vehicles, it can save the time and energy consumption of computing tasks. From the perspective of the MEC servers, they can obtain benefits by providing task offloading services for vehicles. However, due to the limited computing power of the MEC servers and the need to consume network resources such as power and bandwidth for performing task computation, each MEC server typically cannot provide offloading services for all the vehicles within its coverage. In addition, for each MEC server in the networks, it needs to study an effective incentive mechanism in order to attract more vehicles to perform task offloading to obtain benefits. In order to solve the above issues, this chapter proposes a computation offloading scheme based on the Stackelberg game model. In the scheme, we first establish the Stackelberg game model of mobile vehicles and MEC server, where the benefit functions of them are designed. Then, by demonstrating that the vehicle and MEC server have the unique Stackelberg equilibrium solution, a distributed computation offloading algorithm based on Stackelberg game is designed to obtain the optimal game strategies for mobile vehicle and MEC server, respectively. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Stackelberg game based computation offloading scheme.