Bandwidth-Aware Traffic Sensing in Vehicular Networks with Mobile Edge Computing

Traffic sensing is one of the promising applications to guarantee safe and efficient traffic systems in vehicular networks. However, due to the unique characteristics of vehicular networks, such as limited wireless bandwidth and dynamic mobility of vehicles, traffic sensing always faces high estimation error based on collected traffic data with missing elements and over-high communication cost between terminal users and central server. Hence, this paper investigates the traffic sensing system in vehicular networks with mobile edge computing (MEC), where each MEC server enables traffic data collection and recovery in its local server. On this basis, we formulate the bandwidth-constrained traffic sensing (BCTS) problem, aiming at minimizing the estimation error based on the collected traffic data. To tackle the BCTS problem, we first propose the bandwidth-aware data collection (BDC) algorithm to select the optimal uploaded traffic data by evaluating the priority of each road segment covered by the MEC server. Then, we propose the convex-based data recovery (CDR) algorithm to minimize estimation error by transforming the BCTS into an [Formula: see text]-norm minimization problem. Last but not the least, we implement the simulation model and conduct performance evaluation. The comprehensive simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm.