The k-hop-limited V2V2I VANET data offloading using the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) mechanism

The traditional Vehicular ad hoc Network (VANET) data offloading was enabled when a vehicle is inside the signal coverage of an IEEE 802.11p Road Side Unit (RSU) or Wi Fi Access Point (AP). This work proposed to have the VANET data offloading from cellular network's Base Station (BS) to IEEE 802.11p RSU or Wi Fi AP using the multiple hop vehicular to vehicular (V2V) path that can connect with the ahead or the rear RSU/AP to increase the possibility of VANET data offloading. The aforementioned scenario is called V2V2I VANET offloading in this work. The key point of the proposed V2V2I VANET offloading is how to find the multiple hop V2V path that can connect the ahead/rear RSU/AP from the source vehicle to have the VANET data offloading as early as possible and as long as possible. This work proposed the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-based method to tackle related issues for the V2V2I VANET offloading. Based on MEC's centralized computing paradigm, each vehicle reports its context to the MEC server periodically. Since a multiple hop V2V path becomes more unstable when the path has a bigger number of hops, the MEC server gathers reported contexts from vehicles and then uses the proposed k-hop-limited Offloading Time-based V2V2I offloading path Selection (k-hop-limited OTS) method to find the suitable V2V2I VANET offloading path for vehicle V before (after) V entering into (has left) the signal coverage of the ahead (rear) RSU/AP. The performance analysis shown that the proposed MEC-based V2V2I VANET offloading method outperforms the traditional V2I VANET offloading method in different vehicle density's situations.