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To meet the execution requirements of delay-sensitive services in vehicular edge computing (VEC) networks, vehicular services need to be offloaded to edge computing nodes. For complex, large-scale services, the services need to be migrated if the services are not completed before the vehicles leave the coverage of edge computing nodes. Trust and resource matching between areas thus become major problems. This paper studies the decision model of vehicular service offloading and migration. First, software-defined network (SDN) technology is introduced into the traditional network architecture, and a two-layer distributed SDN-controlled VEC network architecture is designed, which is divided into a domain control layer and an area control layer. In this framework, we use the consortium blockchain as a carrier to share network topology information between SDN controllers to prevent information leakage. We then established a service offloading and migration optimization problem model to minimize service execution delay, reduce energy consumption and maximize the throughput of the blockchain system. We describe the problem model as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), introduce a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm named asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) and design a dynamic service offloading and migration algorithm (DSOMA) based on A3C to solve the problem. Simulation results show that DSOMA can increase the throughput of the blockchain system, and DSOMA is superior to the deep Q-learning (DQN) algorithm and greedy offloading algorithm in reducing service execution delay and system energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offloading cellular traffic via Device-to-Device communication (or D2D offloading) has been proved to be an effective way to ease the traffic burden of cellular networks. However, mobile nodes may not be willing to take part in D2D offloading without proper financial incentives since the data offloading process will incur a lot of resource consumption. Therefore, it is imminent to exploit effective incentive mechanisms to motivate nodes to participate in D2D offloading. Furthermore, the design of the content caching strategy is also crucial to the performance of D2D offloading. In this paper, considering these issues, a novel Incentive-driven and Deep Q Network (DQN) based Method, named IDQNM is proposed, in which the reverse auction is employed as the incentive mechanism. Then, the incentive-driven D2D offloading and content caching process is modeled as Integer Non-Linear Programming (INLP), aiming to maximize the saving cost of the Content Service Provider (CSP). To solve the optimization problem, the content caching method based on a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm, named DQN is proposed to get the approximate optimal solution, and a standard Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG)-based payment rule is proposed to compensate for mobile nodes’ cost. Extensive real trace-driven simulation results demonstrate that the proposed IDQNM greatly outperforms other baseline methods in terms of the CSP’s saving cost and the offloading rate in different scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online Ride-Hailing(ORH) service enables riders to enjoy on-demand transportation service with mobile devices. Despite the convenience of the service, privacy leakage could be caused because riders need to submit their locations during ride matching. To protect users’ privacy, much effort has been done to construct a privacy-enhanced ORH system in recent years. However, almost all of current privacy-preserving schemes match the nearest driver to the requesting rider, it is not the optimal matching strategy and unnecessary waste of travel distance may be caused in this way. To solve the problem, we propose a privacy-preserving ORH scheme named pRide, which minimizes the overall travel distance by matching the best driver in global perspective instead of the nearest driver in the local region. To find the best driver, we utilize a deep learning model to predict emergence of ride requests in various regions, and enables the ORH server to perform ride matching leveraging prediction results. Based on the framework, we also propose optimizations to enhance pRide. Moreover, to further defend inference attacks from riders, we propose a private comparing algorithm at the cost of a little communication overhead. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, we prove that pRide is able to decrease the overall travel distance securely and efficiently in ORH matching scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]