Intelligent Computation Offloading for Joint Communication and Sensing-Based Vehicular Networks

To realize an intelligent cooperative vehicle infrastructure system and high-level autonomous driving, the introduction of the joint communication and sensing (JCS) technique in vehicular networks is indispensable. With directional beamforming, the vehicles equipped with JCS systems could utilize unified radio-frequency transceivers and frequency band resources to achieve vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication and sensing functions in different directions, respectively. In this concept, we study the computation offloading problem for JCS-based vehicular networks. Specifically, we formulate a long-term multi-objective problem that jointly optimizes the task execution latency and the sensing performance of multiple vehicles. Owing to the time-varying V2I channel gain, the time-varying impulse response of sensed target, and the stochastic traffic, we reformulate it as a Markov decision process and propose a double-stage deep reinforcement learning-based offloading and power allocation (DDOPA) strategy to determine the task offloading and power allocation for each vehicle. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed strategy compared with different strategies, and show that the proposed DDOPA strategy can achieve a trade-off between execution latency and sensing performance.