Advanced Deep Learning-Based Computational Offloading for Multilevel Vehicular Edge-Cloud Computing Networks

The promise of low latency connectivity and efficient bandwidth utilization has driven the recent shift from vehicular cloud computing (VCC) towards vehicular edge computing (VEC). This paper presents an advanced deep learning-based computational offloading algorithm for multilevel vehicular edge-cloud computing networks. To conserve energy and guarantee the efficient utilization of shared resources among multiple vehicles, an integration model of computational offloading, and resource allocation is formulated as a binary optimization problem to minimize the total cost of the entire system in terms of time and energy. However, this problem is considered NP-hard and it is computationally prohibitive to solve this type of problem, particularly for large-scale vehicles, due to the curse-of-dimensionality problem. Therefore, an equivalent reinforcement learning form is generated and we propose a distributed deep learning algorithm to find the near-optimal computational offloading decisions in which a set of deep neural networks are used in parallel. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can exhibit fast convergence and significantly reduce the overall consumption of an entire system compared to the benchmark solutions.