Real-time computation tasks in vehicular edge computing (VEC) provide convenience for vehicle users. However, the efficiency of task offloading seriously affects the quality of service (QoS). The predictive-mode task offloading is limited by computation resources, storage resources and the timeliness of vehicle trajectory data. Meanwhile, machine learning is difficult to deploy on edge servers. In this paper, we propose a vehicle trajectory prediction method based on the vehicle frequent pattern for task offloading in VEC. First, in the initialization stage, a T-pattern prediction tree (TPPT) is constructed based on the historical vehicle trajectory data. Secondly, when predicting the vehicle trajectory, the vehicle frequent itemset with the largest vehicle trajectory support is found in the vehicle frequent itemset of the TPPT. Finally, in the update stage, the TPPT is updated in real time with the predicted vehicle trajectory results. Meanwhile, based on the proposed prediction method, the strategies of task offloading and optimization algorithm are designed to minimize energy consumption with time constraints. The experiments are carried out on real-vehicle datasets and the Capital Bikeshare datasets. The results show that compared with the baseline T-pattern method, the accuracy of the prediction method is improved by more than 10% and the prediction efficiency is improved by more than 6.5 times. The vehicle trajectory prediction method based on the vehicle frequent pattern has high accuracy and prediction efficiency, which can solve the problem of vehicle trajectory prediction for task offloading.

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is essential in vehicle applications such as traffic control and in-vehicle services. In the task offloading process of VEC, predictive-mode transmission based on deep learning is constrained by limited computational resources. Furthermore, the accuracy of deep learning algorithms in VEC is compromised due to the lack of edge computing features in algorithms. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a task offloading optimization approach that enables edge servers to store deep learning models. Moreover, this paper proposes the LTransformer, a transformer-based framework that incorporates edge computing features. The framework consists of pre-training, an input module, an encoding–decoding module, and an output module. Compared with four sequential deep learning methods, namely a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and the Transformer, the LTransformer achieves the highest accuracy, reaching 80.1% on the real dataset. In addition, the LTransformer achieves 0.008 s when predicting a single trajectory, fully satisfying the fundamental requirements of real-time prediction and enabling task offloading optimization.