TCV-D: An Approach for Path Selection in Vehicular Task Offloading

The vehicular task offloading technology enhances the transportation system by offloading tasks of task-requesting vehicles (TRV) to either vehicular fog nodes (VFN) or road-side units (RSU) using single-hop or multi-hop communication. Due to the limited availability of VFN/RSU within a single-hop of TRV, a multi-hop path is employed for offloading tasks from TRV to VFN/RSU. However, the multi-hop path selection approaches have several issues, such as frequent re-connections due to varying vehicle speed, lower successful offloading when task deadline is missed, increased outage time when no VFN/RSU is within communication range of TRV, and inefficient vehicle selection to offload task leading to longer path lifetime. To address these issues, we have proposed a novel approach called Time-Computation-Variance based deadline sensitive path selection (TCV-D), which considers contextual information from k-hop neighbors. The approach offers four offloading modes: Direct mode, RSU mode, VFN mode, and Search mode, depending on the availability of RSUs/VFNs in single and multi-hop scenarios. To ensure tasks are delivered within deadlines, the proposed approach executes tasks by task forwarding vehicle or neighbor of task forwarding vehicle instead of designated VFN/RSU if delivering the task directly to the destination would exceed the deadline constraint. Extensive result analysis demonstrates substantial improvements compared to the existing k-hop-limited offloading time-based path selection (k-hop-limited-OTS) approach, including a 60% reduction in re-connections, a 35% decrease in path life time, a 30% decrease in outage time, and an 84% increase in successful offloading ratio, approximately.