Service Caching and Task Offloading for Mobile Edge Computing-Enabled Intelligent Connected Vehicles

The development of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) has tremendously inspired the emergence of a new computing paradigm called mobile edge computing (MEC), which meets the demands of delay-sensitive on-vehicle applications. Most existing studies focusing on the issue of task offloading in ICVs assume that the MEC server can directly complete computation tasks without considering the necessity of service caching. However, this is unrealistic in practice because a large number of tasks require the use of corresponding third-party libraries and databases, that is, service caching. Therefore, we investigate the delay optimization in an MEC-enabled ICVs system with multiple mobile vehicles, resource-limited base stations (BSs), and one cloud server. We aim to determine the optimal service caching and task offloading decisions to minimize the overall system delay using mixed-integer nonlinear programming. To address this problem, we first convert it into a quadratically constrained quadratic program and then propose an efficient semidefinite relaxation-based joint service caching and task offloading (JSCTO) algorithm to obtain the service caching and task offloading decisions. In the simulations, we validate the efficiency of our proposed method by setting different numbers of vehicles and the storage capacity of BSs. The results show that our proposed JSCTO algorithm can significantly decrease the total delay of all offloaded tasks compared with the cloud processing only scheme. © 2021, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.