Joint Service Placement and Resource Allocation for Multi-UAV Collaborative Edge Computing

Driven by the burgeoning development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, the recently advocated multi-UAV edge computing paradigm is anticipated to greatly enhance the coverage and on-demand deployment capability of the edge networks. One of the prominent advantage of this paradigm is to allow the UAVs to participate in the edge computing process by executing some computing tasks at their onboard processors. To this end, a key prerequisite is that the corresponding computing services must be placed onboard beforehand. Nonetheless, unlike its counterpart for conventional ground edge systems, the service placement issue in multi-UAV edge computing systems remains much less explored. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first to consider the joint service placement and resource allocation problem for multi-UAV edge computing. Due to the mutual influence between service placement and resource allocation, this problem turns out to be a computationally intractable mixed-integer nonlinear programming. Fortunately, through our analysis, it is found that this problem can be divided into two subproblems that are submodular and convex, respectively. Based on this observation and the general alternative optimization framework, an efficient joint service placement and resource allocation scheme that can find a reasonably good solution with only a linear complexity is proposed. In addition to the analysis, simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.