Many-to-Many Task Offloading in Vehicular Fog Computing: A Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Vehicular fog computing (VFC) has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate vehicular network computation load. In the hierarchical VFC, vehicles are employed as mobile fog nodes at the edge to provide reliable and low-latency services. Particularly, since privately-owned vehicles are rational nodes, their intentions for both computation provision and service demand should be considered instead of overestimating their willingness. To remunerate the participation intentions of vehicles as well as improve vehicular fog resource utilization in the large-scale VFC, the trading-based mechanism is a potential solution. In this article, we propose a many-to-many task offloading framework based on the vehicular trading paradigm. This framework enables computational resource trading across different VFC subsystems and decides the multi-tier task offloading results based on the trading consensus. The trading process is viewed as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and a Multi-Agent Gated actor Attention Critic (MA-GAC) approach is designed to reach an effective and stable offload-and -serve cooperation among vehicles. Theoretical analyses and experiments verify the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed framework, and simulation results demonstrate that the coordinated MA-GAC approach not only benefits vehicles with higher long-term rewards but also optimizes the system social welfare in a distributed manner.