Lightweight Authenticated Task Offloading in 6G-Cloud Vehicular Twin Networks

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of secure, low-latency task offloading in 6G Vehicular Twin Networks (VTNs) by integrating lightweight Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) authentication with a PPO-DRL-based offloading agent. It models end-to-end latency $T_{total}$ across local and cloud execution, incorporating signing, verification, transmission, and cloud processing under cloud capacity constraints $F_{cloud}$ and data rates $T_{icloud}$. Key findings show that IBC overhead can reduce offloading efficiency by up to 50%, with network size and task size producing up to 91.7% reductions, while higher data rates can improve performance by up to 63% despite the overhead. The work provides a reproducible evaluation framework and a blueprint for secure, low-latency VTNs in 6G, with code available on GitHub for replication and extension.

Abstract

Task offloading management in 6G vehicular networks is crucial for maintaining network efficiency, particularly as vehicles generate substantial data. Integrating secure communication through authentication introduces additional computational and communication overhead, significantly impacting offloading efficiency and latency. This paper presents a unified framework incorporating lightweight Identity-Based Cryptographic (IBC) authentication into task offloading within cloud-based 6G Vehicular Twin Networks (VTNs). Utilizing Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), our approach optimizes authenticated offloading decisions to minimize latency and enhance resource allocation. Performance evaluation under varying network sizes, task sizes, and data rates reveals that IBC authentication can reduce offloading efficiency by up to 50% due to the added overhead. Besides, increasing network size and task size can further reduce offloading efficiency by up to 91.7%. As a countermeasure, increasing the transmission data rate can improve the offloading performance by as much as 63%, even in the presence of authentication overhead. The code for the simulations and experiments detailed in this paper is available on GitHub for further reference and reproducibility [1].

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Our Contributions and The Bridged Research Problem.
• Figure 2: IBC-based Authenticated Cloud-VTN Offloading Architecture.
• Figure 3: Average latency (msec) at Different Data Rates. (a) 100 Mbps. (b) 500 Mbps. (c) 1000 Mbps.