Distributed access and offloading scheme for multiple UAVs assisted MEC networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have improved the capacity and coverage of wireless networks. Mobile edge computing (MEC) has provided substantial computation capability to user equipment (UEs). The integration of UAV and MEC can take advantages of both to provide flexible computation service. In UAV assisted MEC networks, delay and energy consumption are two main concerns, which are conflicting to a certain extent. This paper investigates delay and energy consumption jointly in a multiple UAVs assisted MEC network. A cost function is defined to balance the delay and the energy consumption. The user access, task offloading, and computational resource allocation are jointly considered to minimize the long-term cost. To tackle this difficult problem, we formulate the long-term problem into sequential decision problem and treat all UEs as intelligent agents. Each UE decides its access UAV, task offloading proportion, and required edge computation resource to minimize the its own cost. Moreover, the optimal task offloading proportion and required computation resource can be obtained in closed-form given user access so that the action space can be significantly reduced. Then, an adversarial multi-armed bandit based algorithm is employed at each UE and a distributed scheme is proposed to solve the joint optimization problem. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the distributed scheme and show its superiority to benchmarks.