Joint Secure Offloading and Resource Allocation for Vehicular Edge Computing Network: A Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

• Published in: IEEE transactions on intelligent transportation systems 2023-05, Vol.24 (5), p.1-15
• Main Authors: Ju, Ying, Chen, Yuchao, Cao, Zhiwei, Liu, Lei, Pei, Qingqi, Xiao, Ming, Ota, Kaoru, Dong, Mianxiong, Leung, Victor C. M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Collaboration; Cybersecurity; Deep learning; deep reinforcement learning; Dynamic scheduling; Eavesdropping; Edge computing; Frequency spectrum; Heuristic algorithms; Machine learning; Mobile computing; multi-user cooperative offloading; Multiagent systems; Networks; Optimization; physical layer security; Resource allocation; Resource management; Security; spectrum sharing; Task analysis; Vehicle dynamics; Vehicular edge computing; Wiretapping
• ISSN: 1524-9050; 1558-0016; 1558-0016
• DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2023.3242997

The mobile edge computing (MEC) technology can simultaneously provide high-speed computing services for multiple vehicular users (VUs) in vehicular edge computing (VEC) networks. Nevertheless, due to the open feature of the wireless offloading channels and the high mobility of the vehicles, the security and stability of the offloading process would be seriously degraded. In this paper, by utilizing the physical layer security (PLS) technique and spectrum sharing architecture, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based joint secure offloading and resource allocation (SORA) scheme to improve the secrecy performance and resource efficiency of the multi-user VEC networks, where the VU offloading links share the frequency spectrum preoccupied with the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication links. We use Wyner's wiretap coding scheme to obtain the achievable secrecy rate and guarantee that confidential information cannot be decoded by multiple mobile eavesdroppers. We aim at minimizing the system processing delay while securing the wireless offloading process, by jointly optimizing the transmit power, the frequency spectrum selection and the computation resource allocation. We formulate the optimization problem as a multi-agent collaborative optimal decision problem and solve it with a double deep Q-learning algorithm. Besides, we set a punishment mechanism for the rate degradation to guarantee the communication quality of each V2V link. Simulation results demonstrate that multiple VU agents adopting the SORA scheme can rapidly adapt to the highly dynamic VEC networks and cooperate to improve the system delay performance while increasing the secrecy probability.