Energy-Efficient Task Computation at the Edge for Vehicular Services

Abstract Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising solution for providing the computational resources and low latency required by vehicular services, such as autonomous driving. It enables cars to offload computationally intensive tasks to nearby servers. Effective offloading involves determining when to offload tasks, selecting the appropriate MEC site, and efficiently allocating resources to ensure optimal performance. While car mobility poses significant challenges to guaranteeing reliable task completion, today we lack energy-efficient solutions to solve this problem, especially when considering real-world car mobility traces. In this paper, we begin by examining the mobility patterns of cars using data obtained from a leading mobile network operator in Europe. Based on the insights from this analysis, we design an optimization problem for task computation/offloading, considering both static and mobility scenarios. Our objective is to minimize the total energy consumption—both at the cars and the MEC nodes—while satisfying the latency requirements of various tasks. We evaluate our solution, based on multi-agent reinforcement learning, both in simulations as well as in a realistic setup that relies on datasets from the operator. Our solution shows a significant reduction of user dissatisfaction and task interruptions in both static and mobile scenarios, while achieving energy savings of 47% (static) and 14% (mobile) compared to state-of-the-art schemes.