UAV-Assisted Relaying and Edge Computing: Scheduling and Trajectory Optimization

• Published in: IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 18; no. 10; pp. 4738 - 4752
• Main Authors: Hu, Xiaoyan, Wong, Kai-Kit, Yang, Kun, Zheng, Zhongbin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; bandwidth allocation; Channel allocation; Computer architecture; Edge computing; Energy conservation; Energy consumption; Iterative methods; Mobile computing; mobile edge computing; Optimization; Relaying; Resource scheduling; Servers; Task analysis; Trajectory; Trajectory optimization; UAV; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISSN: 1536-1276; 1558-2248
• DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2019.2928539

In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) architecture, in which a UAV roaming around the area may serve as a computing server to help user equipment (UEs) compute their tasks or act as a relay for further offloading their computation tasks to the access point (AP). We aim to minimize the weighted sum energy consumption of the UAV and UEs subject to the task constraints, the information-causality constraints, the bandwidth allocation constraints and the UAV's trajectory constraints. The required optimization is nonconvex, and an alternating optimization algorithm is proposed to jointly optimize the computation resource scheduling, bandwidth allocation, and the UAV's trajectory in an iterative fashion. The numerical results demonstrate that significant performance gain is obtained over conventional methods. Also, the advantages of the proposed algorithm are more prominent when handling computation-intensive latency-critical tasks.