The Delay-Constrained and Network-Situation-Aware V2V2I VANET Data Offloading Based on the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) Architecture

This paper proposes a Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC)-based delay-constrained k-hop-limited VANET data offloading method. In the proposed method, a vehicle X can launch the vehicle-to-vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2V2I) VANET data offload from the cellular network to the IEEE 802.11p/802.11bd Road Side Unit (RSU) when (i) X is not in the corresponding RSU's signal coverage and (ii) there is a multiple-hop vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) path connecting X with a vehicle Y that is inside the RSU's signal coverage. The MEC paradigm is used to check whether a k-hop-limited V2V2I offloading path exists for vehicle X or not based on the periodically reported contexts from vehicles. In addition to use the V2V2I path's lifetime and quality to derive the suitable V2V2I offloading paths using the snapshot VANET topology on the time point of receiving X's reported context, this work proposed a scheme to derive the potential V2V2I paths that may exist in the future, i.e., in a constrained time interval, to find the better V2V2I offloading path. The performance evaluation shown that the proposed method outperforms the one that (i) only considers the data offloading path's lifetime or (ii) does not consider the candidate V2V2I offloading paths existed in the future.