The C-V2V-assisted early small cell data offloading (E-SCDO) method using the multi-access edge computing (MEC) mechanism

This work proposed the concept of Early Small Cell Data Offloading (E-SCDO) that allows a moving vehicle to launch small cell data offloading before the vehicle is inside the signal coverage of a small cell. That is, let vehicle X currently connect with the macro cell and be not inside the signal coverage of any small cell; let vehicle Y currently be inside the signal coverage of a small cell and connect with the small cell. If X and Y can communicate with each other directly using a C-V2V sidelink, then vehicle X can have small cell data offloading through the help of Y. Since (1) there are many vehicles that are inside small cell’s signal coverage and (2) there are many vehicles that are outside small cell’s signal coverage but can connect with one or more vehicles inside small cell’s signal coverage, it needs to have a sophisticated way to resolve the pairing of vehicles to have the effective E-SCDO. This work proposed the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC)-based SideLink Assisted (SLA) E-SCDO method to select suitable vehicles to have E-SCDO. Using the proposed SLA E-SCDO method, the MEC server uses the adopted Auction algorithm to derive feasible pairings of vehicles to have effective E-SCDO. The performance evaluation results shown that the proposed SLA E-SCDO method is better than the traditional self-small cell data offloading method, i.e., having small cell data offloading when the vehicle is inside small cell’s signal coverage, and enhance the performance of network data traffic.