Multi-Access Edge Computing-Based Vehicle-Vehicle-RSU Data Offloading Over the Multi-RSU-Overlapped Environment

This paper proposes a predicted k-hop-limited multi-RSU-considered (PKMR) vehicle to vehicle to roadside unit (RSU) (VVR) data offloading method based on the architecture of the Software Defined Network (SDN) controller inside the multi-access edge computing (MEC) server. In the proposed method, a source vehicle that wants to offload data traffic can use a VVR path that connects the source vehicle and the ahead/rear RSU to perform RSU data offloading when the source vehicle approaches the ahead RSU or leaves the rear RSU. Since some RSUs’ signal ranges may overlap, multi-RSU deployment and RSU handoff between signal-overlapping RSUs must be managed to utilize VVR-based RSU data offloading as much as possible. Based on a vehicle’s periodically reported contexts received by the MEC server, the SDN controller inside the MEC server can execute the proposed PKMR method, which adopts (i) the time-extended prediction mechanism to find the potential VVR paths that exist in a coming time period [tc, tc+T] and (ii) a quality function that takes vehicles’ and RSUs’ network conditions into consideration to select the most suitable VVR data offloading path. The performance evaluation results indicate that the proposed PKMR method produces better data offloading performance than the traditional self-offloading method.