Toward Reliable DNN-based Task Partitioning and Offloading in Vehicular Edge Computing

Modern vehicles have become typical consumer electronics with the development of sensing, transmission, and computation technologies. The emerging intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) yield lots of deep neural network (DNN) based tasks, requiring intensive computation. In view of this, this paper makes the first exploration of accelerating the processing of DNN-based tasks while maintaining decent system reliability in vehicular edge computing (VEC) via task partitioning and offloading. Specifically, we present a specific scenario, where vehicles partition and offload their tasks to nearby vehicles and roadside infrastructures, while they may fail to receive results due to unstable vehicular communications. Then, we model the task delay by considering task properties and node capacities. On this basis, the Partitioning and Offloading Problem (POP) is formulated as a bi-objective optimization problem, to maximize both the acceleration ratio and service ratio of DNN-based tasks in VEC. Further, we propose a Distributed Partitioning and Offloading Solution (DPOS), where a delay-priority-oriented offloading strategy is designed to help edge nodes make offloading decisions, and a stacking-based partitioning strategy is designed to assist client vehicles to make partitioning decisions. Finally, we give a comprehensive performance evaluation, which demonstrates the superiority of the proposed solution.