Energy Consumption Minimization in Secure Multi-Antenna UAV-Assisted MEC Networks With Channel Uncertainty

This paper investigates the robust and secure task transmission and computation scheme in multi-antenna unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) networks, where the UAV is dual-function, i.e., aerial MEC and aerial relay. The channel uncertainty is considered during information offloading and downloading. An energy consumption minimization problem is formulated under some constraints including users’ quality of service and information security requirements and the UAV’s trajectory’s causality, by jointly optimizing the CPU frequency, the offloading time, the beamforming vectors, the artificial noise and the trajectory of the UAV, as well as the CPU frequency, the offloading time and the transmit power of each user. To solve the non-convex problem, a reformulated problem is first derived by a series of convex reformation methods, i.e., semi-definite relaxation, S-Procedure and first-order approximation, and then, solved by a proposed successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithm. The convergence performance and computational complexity of the proposed algorithm are analyzed. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing benchmark schemes. Besides, the proposed SCA-based algorithm is superior to traditional alternative optimization-based algorithm.