A Multi-Routing Paths' Exploration Algorithm for Multi-paired Communicating Vehicles' Data Transmission Offloading using the Multi-access Edge Computing Architecture

This work proposed a novel method for multiple communicating paired vehicles' data transmission offloading using the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) technique. When two paired communicating vehicles are communicating with each other through cellular network's Base Stations (BSs), the data transmission can be offloaded to the Cellular Vehicle-to-Vehicle (C-V2V) path that exists between these two vehicles using 5G NR's sidelink communication; these two paired communicating vehicles can switch back to the Cellular Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (C-V2I) communication to communicate with each other when the corresponding C-V2V path is broken. Using the proposed method, the MEC architecture serves as a centralized computing mechanism to determine the availability of k-hop C-V2V paths for paired communicating vehicles' data transmission offloading. Each vehicle periodically reports its context, such as position, speed, driving direction, and C-V2V sidelinks' Channel Busy Ratios (CBRs), to the MEC server to derive feasible k-hop C-V2V data transmission offloading paths. The simulation result demonstrates that the proposed method has (i) better throughput compared to the method of relying solely on C-V2I communication through BSs and (ii) better throughput, higher offloading fraction and lower average data loss rate comparing with the other k-hop-limited CV2V data transmission offloading method.