Mobility-aware Seamless Service Migration and Resource Allocation in Multi-edge IoV Systems

Abstract

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) offers low-latency and high-bandwidth support for Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) applications. However, due to high vehicle mobility and finite communication coverage of base stations, it is hard to maintain uninterrupted and high-quality services without proper service migration among MEC servers. Existing solutions commonly rely on prior knowledge and rarely consider efficient resource allocation during the service migration process, making it hard to reach optimal performance in dynamic IoV environments. To address these important challenges, we propose SR-CL, a novel mobility-aware seamless Service migration and Resource allocation framework via Convex-optimization-enabled deep reinforcement Learning in multi-edge IoV systems. First, we decouple the Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) problem of service migration and resource allocation into two sub-problems. Next, we design a new actor-critic-based asynchronous-update deep reinforcement learning method to handle service migration, where the delayed-update actor makes migration decisions and the one-step-update critic evaluates the decisions to guide the policy update. Notably, we theoretically derive the optimal resource allocation with convex optimization for each MEC server, thereby further improving system performance. Using the real-world datasets of vehicle trajectories and testbed, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed SR-CL. Compared to benchmark methods, the SR-CL achieves superior convergence and delay performance under various scenarios.