Incentive-Driven Partial Offloading and Resource Allocation in Vehicular Edge Computing Networks

Vehicle edge computing can effectively ensure the quality of experience for user vehicles (UVs), but road side units (RSUs) with limited resources may not be able to handle intensive tasks under high traffic conditions. In this case, worker vehicles (WVs) with idle resources can share resources to alleviate the pressure on RSUs. However, selfish WVs may be reluctant to share idle computation resources without any rewards. In addition, the optimization problems in previous research are relatively simple and cannot be applied to complex scenarios. To address the above challenges, we propose an incentive-driven partial offloading framework aiming to maximize social welfare. In particular, the computing service provider (CSP) managing RSUs first determines resource prices and offloading rates with UVs, while also determining contract terms with WVs. Then, it generates the optimal task scheduling strategy and notifies the UVs to offload tasks to the corresponding WVs. Considering that maximizing social welfare is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, we design the hybrid proximal policy optimization (HPPO)-based task offloading and resource allocation algorithm (HORA) with a hybrid action space to directly solve the original problem. Finally, extensive simulation results show that HORA outperforms other baseline methods across various scenarios, and the contract terms meet the constraints of individual rationality (IR) and incentive compatibility (IC).