Optimizing Task Offloading for Collaborative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Fog–Cloud Computing Environments

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used in various applications, including crowd management, crime prevention, accident detection, and rescue operations. However, since UAVs perform their tasks independently, some UAV applications are dynamic and geographically distributed, which may require extensive real-time processing capabilities. Thus, processing UAV data locally can be challenging due to their limited computing capabilities. To overcome such limitations, fog and cloud computing can facilitate UAV application development by providing additional resource capacities when needed. Despite this, designing sophisticated and efficient UAV task offloading strategies that collaborate with fog and cloud technologies considering their service latency and energy consumption, is rarely addressed in the literature. Therefore, a collaborative offloading strategy for UAV applications is presented in this work, leveraging fog and cloud computing advantages and capabilities. This approach aims to minimize UAVs’ service latency and energy consumption, as well as provide the required resources and services in real time. In addition, task offloading decisions are formulated using the Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to reduce the energy consumption of the entire UAV-fog-cloud system by optimizing the allocation of computation resources and communication requested by each UAV. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can significantly reduce UAV service latency by 15.38%, 35.29%, and 59.26%, as well as decrease overall energy consumption (including processing and networking) by 3.3%, 7.37%, and 12% when compared to alternative standalone strategies (namely UAV, fog, and cloud).