Energy Efficient Transmission Strategy for Mobile Edge Computing Network in UAV-Based Patrol Inspection System

In this paper, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based patrol inspection scenario, where the cellular-connected UAV traverses multiple pre-determined waypoints for data collection, and then offloads computation task to the ground base stations (GBSs). This paper aims to minimize the sum of the total energy consumption by jointly optimizing the task completion time, communication scheduling, computation resource allocation, and UAV's trajectory. First, we decompose the original problem into two trackable subproblems: 1) design the optimal traverse order among cruise points; and 2) determine the optimal transmission strategy between two consecutive cruise points. Then, by involving the communication rate performance and the topology construct among the GBSs and the cruise points, a novel weighted factor of the edge is proposed to design the traverse order, which can be compatible with the light and heavy task offloading scenarios. The successive convex approximation (SCA) technique and block coordinate descent (BCD) framework are adopted to optimize the UAV's trajectory and the wireless resource allocation. The numerical results finally indicate that our proposed transmission strategy solution decreases the total energy consumption in various scenarios and outperforms other benchmark schemes.