An Incentive Mechanism for Computation Offloading in Satellite-Terrestrial Internet of Vehicles

With the development of satellite-terrestrial technology and the popularity of the Internet of Vehicles, how to improve the efficiency of mobile cloud computing (MCC) has become the next concern. However, the resource of cloudlets is not sufficient to perform large-scale computation tasks, or some applications designed to run on vehicles have more efficiency executed on vehicles than executed on cloudlets. Additionally, it is still challenging for platforms to motivate mobile vehicle owners to join in the process while the existing mechanisms cannot provide all the desired properties in cloudlet scenarios. To this end, we design a satellite-terrestrial IoV based on an incentive mechanism for computation offloading (IMCO) in mobile edge computing to motivate vehicle owners to perform computation offloading tasks so as to offload certain kinds of tasks to the mobile vehicles. By optimizing the MCC model, we integrate auction theory into the mechanism to ensure individual rationality, budget balance, system efficiency, and truthfulness for both sellers and buyers. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we prove that our mechanism can achieve computational efficiency under the condition that all algorithm outputs be computed in polynomial time. Both theoretical derivations and numerical calculations prove that all the desired properties of the mechanism hold.