Sep 2026· IEEE Internet of Things Journal· Vol 13, pp. 40814-40829· 0 citations· 44 references
Abstract
Vehicular edge computing (VEC), a key enabler for the Internet of Things (IoT) in intelligent transportation, addresses onboard processing constraints through collaborative task offloading among vehicles, facilitating latency-sensitive applications such as autonomous driving. However, developing efficient offloading strategies remains particularly challenging in high-density vehicular networks, where intensive computational demands coexist with severely constrained intervehicle communication ranges due to signal blockage. To handle this, we propose M4O, a mobility-aware task offloading framework supporting multihop, multiuser, and multitask offloading optimization. M4O intelligently integrates vehicle mobility patterns and enables relay-assisted offloading to enhance system effectiveness and robustness. The framework employs a dual-algorithm approach: the advantage actor–critic (A2C) for indivisible tasks and the hybrid proximal policy optimization (H-PPO) for divisible tasks, both optimized to minimize the temporally coupled composite cost of time and resources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based solutions of M4O deliver stable and efficient offloading strategies, outperforming existing benchmarks by significant margins in cost efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zhouym1028/M4O
With the rapid growth of Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) and Mobile Edge Computing, efficient task offloading is essential for enhancing the computing and communication capabilities in vehicular networks. However, many existing methods suffer from slow convergence, load imbalance, and instability in dynamic, latency-sensitive environments. To address these challenges, we propose MAPPO-Lyapunov (MAPPO-L), a multi-agent offloading framework that integrates Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) with Lyapunov optimization. MAPPO-L enables distributed coordination among vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), and cloud servers, minimizing delay, improving resource utilization, and ensuring long-term stability. Lyapunov theory transforms long-term stability into per-slot optimizations, while MAPPO ensures efficient policy learning. An adaptive exploration mechanism dynamically adjusts exploration rates based on network dynamics, accelerating convergence and stabilizing training. Extensive simulations with real-world data show that MAPPO-L maintains task completion rates above 80%, converges 25%–37.5% faster than baselines, and reduces training fluctuations to 2.3%. Ablation studies confirm the critical roles of location, channel, and queue information, validating the robustness of MAPPO-L in practical VEC environments.
Lu Wei, Yong Yu, Jie Cui et al.· IEEE Transactions on Network...· 0 citations
The integration of 5G/6G networks with the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) requires efficient computational offloading for data-intensive applications such as autonomous driving and augmented reality. Although Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer agile mobile edge computing (MEC) capabilities, their operational efficiency is hampered by high mobility, limited battery life, and the complexity of joint resource optimization. Existing offloading strategies often fail to simultaneously optimize latency, energy consumption, and resource utilization under dynamic IoV conditions. This paper proposes a novel Energy-Optimized Lightweight Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework for intelligent task offloading in UAV-assisted IoV networks. Our approach leverages a simplified Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) to dynamically manage task partitioning by intelligent offloading decisions, UAV trajectory planning through optimized path forecasting, and resource allocation through adaptive computation distribution. Key innovations include a streamlined state-space design that reduces computational overhead by 30% and a composite reward function that balances latency and energy objectives. These are realized by a prioritized experience replay mechanism and a target network separation strategy that enhances learning stability. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves a task success rate of 98.5%, reduces latency by 40%, and maintains a 78.1%. The results confirm the framework’s superiority, demonstrating significant improvements over its base architecture (DQN), its enhanced variant (DDQN), and other state-of-the-art baselines like MADDPG and game-theoretic approaches, thereby providing a robust solution for practical UAV-IoV deployments.
Fitzgerald Quincy Clarke, J. Odoom, Ruth S. Kubvoruno et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
A preference-adaptive dueling double deep Q-network algorithm, termed PA-DDQN, is proposed by integrating preference conditioning, multi-head attention, a dueling architecture, and double Q-learning, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing service responsiveness, energy efficiency, and reliability in smart library MEC systems.
Jingjing Qu, Peiying Zhang, Ruixin Wang et al.· Information· 0 citations
The rapid growth of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) applications has imposed strict requirements on low-latency and energy-efficient computing services. This letter investigates a multi-Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted IoV system, where multiple Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)-enabled UAVs (MUs) collaboratively provide computing services for vehicular terminals (VTs). To improve service capability, we propose an energy-efficient task offloading and load balancing scheme that jointly considers vehicle mobility, task offloading and migration, and computing resource allocation to formulate an optimization problem. To solve this problem, a collective learning (CL)-enabled multi-agent reinforcement learning (CL-MARL) algorithm is proposed, where each agent learns optimal policies through centralized training and collective cooperative learning. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms benchmark strategies in terms of energy efficiency, task completion rate, and load balancing.
Yongbin Wang, Peng Lin, Yan Liu et al.· IEEE Wireless Communications...· 0 citations
The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has placed unprecedented pressure on the network edge, where applications such as augmented reality, real-time analytics, and autonomous navigation demand low latency and tight energy budgets that traditional cloud-centric architectures cannot meet. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) addresses this gap by relocating computation closer to end users, but the core question of where and how each task should be executed remains open: rulebased and single-objective offloading strategies fail to simultaneously balance service latency, energy efficiency, and user experience under dynamic, large-scale conditions. In this paper we propose TARLOT (Two-Agent Reinforcement Learning Offloading Tasks), a cooperative framework for threetier IoT–MEC–Cloud environments. TARLOT decouples the offloading decision from the resourceallocation problem and assigns each to a dedicated Q-learning agent, so that the two subproblems are specialised independently while still being optimised jointly. The framework is evaluated on PureEdgeSim under heterogeneous IoT workloads, device densities ranging from 200 to 2,400, and diverse application profiles, and is compared against five widely-used baselines (Random, Round-Robin, Trade-Off, Pure-Edge, and Pure-Cloud). At 2,400 devices, TARLOT delivers an average service time of 1.1 s (against 4.3 s for Pure-Cloud), a Quality of Experience of 0.77 (against 0.22 for Pure-Cloud), a task-failure rate below 2 % (against nearly 14 % for Pure-Cloud), and a per-device energy consumption of only 3.6 W (against 11.2 W for Pure-Cloud) — roughly a 68 % reduction. Balanced CPU utilisation across the local, edge, and cloud tiers further confirms that TARLOT prevents resource bottlenecks, establishing it as a practical solution for next-generation large-scale IoT deployments.
Oussama Lagnfdi, Marouane Myyara, A. Darif· International journal of Com...· 0 citations
Vehicular edge computing (VEC) has emerged as a key paradigm to support computation-intensive and delay-sensitive vehicular applications by offloading tasks from vehicles to nearby multi-access edge computing (MEC) servers. However, in realistic urban environments, task processing performance is heavily affected by heterogeneous vehicle-MEC interactions, spatiotemporal traffic dynamics, and continuously varying vehicle populations. To address these challenges, this paper considers a traffic-aware embodied edge intelligence-enabled vehicular network (EEIVN), where edge intelligence is grounded in the physical traffic environment by integrating VLM-based semantic perception with edge decision making. Based on this architecture, we formulate a reliability-constrained delay minimization problem (RDMP) by jointly optimizing task offloading ratio, computing resource allocation, and vehicle association, while constraining the queue reliability to mitigate queue-induced tail delay. To solve the NP-hard RDMP, we propose a VLM-multi-agent proximal policy optimization (VLM-MAPPO) approach that integrates a VLM-based traffic awareness method, a vehicle-adaptive MAPPO algorithm, and a vehicle association scoring and selection mechanism. Extensive simulations based on SUMO and CARLA demonstrate that the proposed VLM-MAPPO approach outperforms benchmarks in terms of task completion delay and tail delay, while maintaining comparable vehicle energy consumption and exhibiting robust scalability under dynamic traffic conditions and varying vehicle densities.
Xulong Qiao, Jian Wang, Zemin Sun et al.· IEEE Transactions on Cogniti...· 0 citations
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