Satellite-UAV-MEC Collaborative Architecture for Task Offloading in Vehicular Networks

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been proposed as a solution for relieving the network congestion problem in the backhaul by distributing computing resources near to end devices, providing a chance to satisfy low latency requirement applications. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), on the other hand, has been investigated to be a flying edge node. With its high mobility, it can adapt well to any kind of scenarios such as highway, city, or rural. In this paper, we propose an architecture composed of a satellite, MEC servers connected to base stations (BSs), UAVs, together with vehicular networks. Under this scheme, we propose a two-stage algorithm called SUM by considering the UAVs deployment and task offloading decision, aiming at accepting more requests and enhance the resource utilization. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the other three approaches in terms of long-term profit.