When UAV Swarm Meets Edge-Cloud Computing: The QoS Perspective

In this article, we propose a hybrid computing model, UAV-Edge-Cloud, bringing edge/cloud computing and UAV swarm together to achieve high quality of service (QoS) guarantees. First, we design this novel hybrid computing framework to provide powerful resources to support resource-intensive applications and real-time tasks at edge networks. Next, we discuss some potential applications for smart cities and raise open research issues of the proposed hybrid framework. We then study a joint task placement and routing problem for latency-critical applications as a case study. Finally, the simulation results show that our approach can improve the QoS of UAV swarms effectively.