Market-Driven Computation Offloading for Air–Ground Collaborative Vehicular Edge Computing

Biao Xiang

doi:10.1109/jiot.2026.3702851

Market-Driven Computation Offloading for Air–Ground Collaborative Vehicular Edge Computing

2026-06-11

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DOI：10.1109/jiot.2026.3702851

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The proliferation of delay-sensitive applications in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) poses significant challenges to conventional vehicular edge computing (VEC), particularly in terms of limited coverage and constrained computing resources. To address these issues, this article proposes a market-driven air–ground collaborative VEC framework that unifies heterogeneous computing services provided by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), roadside unit (RSU), and vehicle platoon (VP) within a common pricing-and-allocation mechanism. The interaction among service providers and the user vehicle (UV) is modeled as a multiple-leader single-follower Stackelberg game, where UAV, RSU, and VP act as heterogeneous leaders that announce service prices, and the UV acts as the follower that determines task allocation ratios. The main contribution of this work lies in establishing a unified economic coordination model for heterogeneous air–ground edge services, together with a numerical equilibrium computation framework tailored to the resulting low-dimensional bounded pricing game. We show that the follower-side optimization problem is convex and admits a unique optimal response, and that the upper level pricing game admits at least one Nash equilibrium. Based on this structure, we develop a coarse-to-fine grid-search-based Stackelberg equilibrium computation method (CFGS-SE), which directly verifies best-response consistency through numerical evaluation and local refinement. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves high follower utility and low energy consumption while maintaining competitive delay performance and balanced task allocation. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides an effective solution for price-guided task allocation in air–ground collaborative VEC.

Keywords:

Air–ground integration

computation offloading

market-driven coordination

pricing mechanism

Stackelberg game

vehicular edge computing (VEC)

Market-Driven Computation Offloading for Air–Ground Collaborative Vehicular Edge Computing

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