A Computation Offloading Incentive Mechanism with Delay and Cost Constraints under 5G Satellite-ground IoV architecture

The 5G Internet of Vehicles has become a new paradigm alongside the growing popularity and variety of computation-intensive applications with high requirements for computational resources and analysis capabilities. Existing network architectures and resource management mechanisms may not sufficiently guarantee satisfactory Quality of Experience and network efficiency, mainly suffering from coverage limitation of Road Side Units, insufficient resources, and unsatisfactory computational capabilities of onboard equipment, frequently changing network topology, and ineffective resource management schemes. To meet the demands of such applications, in this article, we first propose a novel architecture by integrating the satellite network with 5G cloud-enabled Internet of Vehicles to efficiently support seamless coverage and global resource management. A incentive mechanism based joint optimization problem of opportunistic computation offloading under delay and cost constraints is established under the aforementioned framework, in which a vehicular user can either significantly reduce the application completion time by offloading workloads to several nearby vehicles through opportunistic vehicle-to-vehicle channels while effectively controlling the cost or protect its own profit by providing compensated computing service. As the optimization problem is non-convex and NP-hard, simulated annealing based on the Markov Chain Monte Carlo as well as the metropolis algorithm is applied to solve the optimization problem, which can efficaciously obtain both high-quality and cost-effective approximations of global optimal solutions. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is corroborated through simulation results.