The Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-Based VANET Data Offloading Using the Staying-Time-Oriented k-Hop Away Offloading Agent

This paper proposed a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-based k-hop away IEEE 802.11p Road Side Unit (RSU) Vehicular-to-Infrastructure (V2I) offloading method. Let a vehicle X regularly use LTE cellular network to communicate with the peer entity in the infrastructure side, i.e., in Internet. When there is a k-hop V2V path that can connect X with the ahead RSU, the V2I offloading can be enabled; additionally, when X has left the signal coverage of the corresponding RSU, if there is a k-hop V2V path that can connect X with the rear RSU, the V2I offloading can still be continued. In the proposed method, a MEC server is used to compute whether the k-hop V2I offloading can be enabled and maintained or not. This work also shows the performance analysis for different offloading scenarios in situations of different vehicular density.