Task Offloading of Deep Learning Services for Autonomous Driving in Mobile Edge Computing

As the utilization of complex and heavy applications increases in autonomous driving, research on using mobile edge computing and task offloading for autonomous driving is being actively conducted. Recently, researchers have been studying task offloading algorithms using artificial intelligence, such as reinforcement learning or partial offloading. However, these methods require a lot of training data and critical deadlines and are weakly adaptive to complex and dynamically changing environments. To overcome this weakness, in this paper, we propose a novel task offloading algorithm based on Lyapunov optimization to maintain the system stability and minimize task processing delay. First, a real-time monitoring system is built to utilize distributed computing resources in an autonomous driving environment efficiently. Second, the computational complexity and memory access rate are analyzed to reflect the characteristics of the deep learning applications to the task offloading algorithm. Third, Lyapunov and Lagrange optimization solves the trade-off issues between system stability and user requirements. The experimental results show that the system queue backlog remains stable, and the tasks are completed within an average of 0.4231 s, 0.7095 s, and 0.9017 s for object detection, driver profiling, and image recognition, respectively. Therefore, we ensure that the proposed task offloading algorithm enables the deep learning application to be processed within the deadline and keeps the system stable.