Truthful Auction Mechanisms for Dependent Task Offloading in Vehicular Edge Computing

This work investigates the truthful auction for dependent task offloading in vehicular edge computing by considering the selfishness and rationality of participating nodes. Specifically, we first illustrate a truthfulness-guaranteed dependent task offloading architecture. Then, we formulate the Truthfulness-Guaranteed Dependent Task Offloading problem, aiming at maximizing the system utility (SU) while ensuring truthfulness and individual rationality in dynamic environments. Further, we design both centralized and distributed auction mechanisms to derive the optimal and approximate solutions, respectively. For centralized auction mechanism, we adopt the branch-and-price algorithm to determine the offloaded nodes, which yields maximum SU. Then, we adopt VCG mechanism to determine the payment of buyers. For distributed auction mechanism, each seller independently chooses the winning bid, and the buyer greedily chooses the offloaded node with maximum utility. Then, a novel payment mechanism regarding the cost of failed buyers is designed to guarantee the truthfulness and individual rationality. Finally, we build the simulation model and conduct the performance evaluation based on realistic vehicular trajectories. The results demonstrate that the proposed distributed auction mechanism achieves performance within approximately 4% of the optimal method, while significantly reducing computational complexity. Additionally, it significantly outperforms other methods in terms of system utility across various task requirements.