Neural Network-based Game Theory for Scalable Offloading in Vehicular Edge Computing: A Transfer Learning Approach

With the unprecedented scalability issues rising in vehicular edge computing (VEC), we argue in this paper that the scalability, along with the remarkable growth of demands for offloading, should be integrated into the modelling for effective offloading decision-making strategies requested by a large number of vehicles. A two-stage game-theory model can depict offloading decision-making strategies by considering both the revenue of network operators and the cost of VEC users. However, heuristic processes of solving such models show significant limitations in terms of high computational complexity and energy consumption due to the changing VEC environment. Therefore, our objective in this study is to solve the game-theory model efficiently and achieve scalable offloading for the changing VEC environment. We first develop a two-stage game-theory model for the offloading decision-making strategy for VEC, by which an operator’s revenue, energy consumption and latency are considered. Then a neural network (NN) model is designed to learn the predicted behaviours of the established game-theory model for offloading decisions in a more efficient manner. After that, a feature-based transfer learning algorithm is proposed for scalable offloading optimization under unseen VEC environments. Experimental results show that the proposed NN can significantly improve the efficiency of solving the game theory model, and the developed transfer learning approach can effectively achieve the scalability of offloading decisions in a changing VEC environment. The results demonstrate that the accuracy of the proposed transfer learning approach is 37% higher than that of several state-of-the-art algorithms, and the runtime halves.