RADiT: Resource Allocation in Digital Twin-Driven UAV-Aided Internet of Vehicle Networks

Digital twin (DT) has emerged as a promising technology for improving resource allocation decisions in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) networks. In this paper, we consider an IoV network where mobile edge computing (MEC) servers are deployed at the roadside units (RSUs). The IoV network provides ubiquitous connections even in areas uncovered by RSUs with the assistance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which can act as a relay between RSUs and task vehicles. A virtual representation of the IoV network is established in the aerial network as DT which captures the dynamics of the entities of the physical network in real-time in order to perform efficient resource allocation for delay-intolerant tasks. We investigate an intelligent delay-sensitive task offloading scheme for the dynamic vehicular environment which provides computation resources via local execution, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), and vehicle-to-roadside-unit (V2I) offloading modes based on the energy consumption of the system. Moreover, we also propose a multi-network deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based resource allocation algorithm (RADiT) in the DT-assisted network for maximizing the utility of the IoV network while optimizing the task offloading strategy. Further, we compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with and without the presence of V2V computation mode. RADiT is further evaluated by comparing it with another benchmark DRL algorithm called soft actor-critic (SAC) and a non-DRL approach called greedy. Finally, simulations are performed to demonstrate that the utility of the proposed RADiT algorithm is higher under every condition compared to its respective conditions in SAC and greedy approach. Consequently, the proposed framework jointly improves energy efficiency and reduces the overall delay of the network. The proposed algorithm with UAV relay further increases the efficiency of the network by increasing the task completion rate.