Reconfigurable-Intelligent-Surface-Aided Vehicular Edge Computing: Joint Phase-Shift Optimization and Multiuser Power Allocation

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is an emerging technology with significant potential in the field of Internet of Vehicles (IoV), enabling vehicles to perform intensive computational tasks locally or offload them to nearby edge devices. However, the quality of communication links may be severely deteriorated due to obstacles such as buildings, impeding the offloading process. To address this challenge, we introduce the use of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which provide alternative communication pathways to assist vehicle communication. By dynamically adjusting the phase-shift of the RIS, the performance of VEC systems can be substantially improved. In this work, we consider an RIS-assisted VEC system, and design an optimal scheme for local execution power, offloading power, and RIS phase-shift, where random task arrivals and channel variations are taken into account. To address the scheme, we propose an innovative deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that combines the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm for optimizing RIS phase-shift coefficients and the multiagent DDPG (MADDPG) algorithm for optimizing the power allocation of vehicle user (VU). Simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the traditional centralized DDPG, twin delayed DDPG (TD3), and some typical stochastic schemes.