Latency-Aware Optimal Scheduling Scheme for Computational Offloading

Proactive safety and vehicle automation typically requires high energy use from sensors and energy-intensive computing from sensor data processing. For high-quality, reliable perception and localization within a driving environment at the vehicle level, incoming data from multiple sensors need to be fused using advanced computational algorithms, which demand a high compute load. Alternatively, computational offloading of automated driving tasks shifts energy consumption from the vehicle to cloud infrastructure, where renewable energy sources, such as hydropower or solar power, can be utilized more efficiently. Herein, an optimal scheduling strategy for autonomous driving tasks via the cloud layer is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem and verified using measurement-informed task graphs. It is shown that cloud-based computational offloading enables energy-efficient operation while maintaining task deadlines to ensure the timely availability of perception and localization information, which is consistent with prior studies in the literature. Simulation results demonstrate that on average, 35.78% of the computational load was offloaded to the cloud, which can achieve significant energy savings for the onboard system. The compute operations achieved an average energy savings of 35.65%, while total system savings ranged from 26.16% to 30.67% under different cloud energy efficiency scenarios, highlighting the advantages of offloading compute-intensive tasks. The framework was further evaluated using multiple directed acyclic graph (DAG) configurations to assess its scalability and adaptability. Critical tasks, such as sensor fusion, were executed exclusively on the vehicle to ensure real-time responsiveness.