AI Driven Heterogeneous MEC System with UAV Assistance for Dynamic Environment: Challenges and Solutions

By taking full advantage of Computing, Communication and Caching (3C) resources at the network edge, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is envisioned as one of the key enablers for next generation networks. However, current fixed-lo-cation MEC architecture may not be able to make real-time decision in dynamic environments, especially in large-scale scenarios. To address this issue, in this article, a Heterogeneous MEC (H-MEC) architecture is proposed, which is composed of fixed unit, i.e., Ground Stations (GSs) as well as moving nodes, i.e., Ground Vehicles (GVs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), all with 3C resource enabled. The key challenges in H-MEC, i.e., mobile edge node management, real-time decision making, user association and resource allocation along with the possible Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions, are discussed. In addition, the AI-based joint Resource schEduling (ARE) framework with two different AI-based mechanisms, i.e., Deep neural network (DNN)-based and deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based architectures, are proposed. DNN-based solution with online incremental learning applies the global optimizer and therefore has better performance than the DRL-based architecture with online policy updating, but requires longer training time. The simulation results are given to verify the efficiency of our proposed ARE framework.