TA-STGAT: A Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network for Edge-State Prediction in Vehicular Edge Computing

Abstract

In dynamic Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) environments, rapidly changing vehicle mobility and traffic lead to fluctuating edge resource demands, challenging task offloading and scheduling. Accurate prediction of future traffic flow and traffic-state-derived workload representations is thus crucial for proactive resource management. To address the limitations of existing methods in short-term dynamic characterization, complex spatial interaction modeling, and heterogeneous target prediction, this paper proposes a Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network (TA-STGAT). The proposed model constructs multi-dimensional RSU-level state sequences from simulated trajectories generated on a real-world road network and separately forecasts vehicle flow within RSU coverage areas and the associated traffic-state-derived workload representation under a unified spatio-temporal modeling framework. By integrating gated dilated temporal convolutions with a topology-constrained multi-head graph attention mechanism, the model captures multi-scale temporal dependencies and nonlinear spatial correlations. Experimental results show that, compared with the best-performing baseline in terms of RMSE for each forecasting task, TA-STGAT reduces RMSE by 10.89% and 11.29% in workload-representation prediction and traffic flow prediction, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness for short-term edge-state forecasting.