Dynamic Many-to-Many Task Offloading in Vehicular Fog Computing: A Multi-Agent DRL Approach
Zhiwei Wei, Bing Li, Rongqing Zhang, Xiang Cheng, Liuqing Yang
Abstract
Confronted with the increasing computation-intensive requirements of vehicular applications, vehicular fog computing (VFC) has emerged as the promising solution to mitigate the load at the edge of vehicular network. In VFC, vehicles are employed as vehicular fog nodes to provide reliable services with applicability. However, considering the individual serving and offloading intentions of the privately-owned vehicles, the many-to-many task offloading in dynamic vehicular environment becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a distributed dynamic many-to-many task offloading framework based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) trading paradigm to improve the fog resource utilization in VFC. In order to reach an effective and stable offload-and-serve cooperation between vehicles as service demanders and vehicles as computation providers in the proposed framework, we formulate the trading process as a partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) and design a Multi-Agent Gated actor Attention Critic (MA-GAC) approach, leading to an efficient offloading optimization process in a distributed manner. Theoretical analysis and experiments verify the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed framework, and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MA-GAC approach outperforms other benchmarks in the dynamic environment.