Game Theory Based Opportunistic Computation Offloading in Cloud-Enabled IoV

With the growing popularity of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless systems and cloud-enabled Internet of Vehicles, vehicular cloud has been introduced as a novel mobile device computing mode, which enables vehicles to offload their computation-intensive tasks to neighbors. In this paper, we first present a 5G cloud-enabled scenario of vehicular cloud computing where a vehicular terminal works either as a service provider with idle computation resources or a requestor who has a computation-intensive task that can be executed either locally or offloaded to nearby providers via opportunistic vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Then, we study the following issues: 1) how to determine the appropriate offloading rate of requestors; 2) how to select the most appropriate computation service provider; 3) how to identify the ideal pricing strategy for each service provider. We address the above-mentioned problems by developing a two-player Stackelberg-game-based opportunistic computation offloading scheme under situations involving complete and incomplete information that primarily considers task completion duration and service price. We simplify the former case into a common resource assignment problem with mathematical solutions. For the latter case, Stackelberg equilibriums of the offloading game are derived, and the corresponding existence conditions are concretely discussed. Finally, a Monte-Carlo simulation-based performance evaluation shows that the proposed methods can significantly reduce the task completion duration while ensuring the profit of service providers, thus achieving mutually satisfactory computation offloading decisions. - 2013 IEEE.This work was supported in part by the Major Research Plan of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 91638204, in part by the 2015 National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61401381, in part by the State Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61731012, in part by the 2018 National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61871339, and in part by the Key Laboratory of Digital Fujian on IoT Communication, Architecture and Safety Technology under Grant 2010499.Scopu