Vehicular Computation Offloading for Real-time Applications

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With the ever increasing expectation for intelligent transportation, very powerful computing capabilities are required to improve road safety, enhance transport efficiency, and enrich the travel experience. For example, video clips captured by many cameras in and around vehicles are processed for avoiding collisions, interactive maps and augmented reality are embedded in many transportation-related applications, and games with high resolution virtual reality are common in the mobile devices of passengers. These computation-intensive applications are often time critical, due to road safety or their interactive nature. As a result, supporting these services and applications may greatly exceed the processing capability of single vehicles or mobile devices.******The concepts of mobile cloud computation and computation offloading enable vehicles and mobile devices to offload part or all the computation load to other devices that help speed up the executions. As a result, the traditional vehicular communication systems are being transformed from mainly providing communication services for drivers and passengers to an integrated system of communications, computing, and control. Powerful cloud servers may be accessed by vehicular users through wireless networks and the Internet, but they are more suitable for delay-tolerable services due to the relatively long delay to access the servers. For time-sensitive applications, servers should be deployed close to the vehicular users to reduce the communication delay. ******If road side units and cellular base stations are available along a road, dedicated edge servers can be installed and co-located with these infrastructure devices. However, it is unlikely that this fixed infrastructure can cover all roads in the near future due to possible low capital returns, complicated design issues, unpredictable communication and computation demands, and other reasons. On the other hand, future smart vehicles are likely to have, or can be equipped with, relatively powerful computation units, and can either help other devices or collaborate together in processing complicated tasks. Given the large number of smart devices on road and their wide geographical distribution, their aggregate computing capability can be enormous. The objective of this research is to study how to effectively integrate the available computing resources at pre-installed computing devices and moving vehicles along roads, and efficiently utilize these resources with the support of the existing vehicular communication networks to provide safe and convenient transportation and enriched travel experiences. ******The new ideas and knowledge generated from this research will promote a great market opportunity for various road and travel related products and applications, which will be of strong interest to automobile industry, wireless network providers and users, and software industry.**