STAR-RIS and UAV Combination in MEC Networks: Simultaneous Task Offloading and Communications

This paper explores a simultaneous tasks offloading and communications (STOC) scheme in mobile edge computing (MEC) networks, supported by the combination of simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) and the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Different from the traditional MEC schemes, the proposed scheme concurrently considers the computation and communication capabilities of the MEC networks, which is actually more practical in reality. Specifically, an optimization problem is devised to maximize the weighted sum of the minimum computed task data and communication data, while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) constraints for STOC through joint design of time scheduling, resource allocation, active and passive beamforming, alongside with the UAV trajectory planning. This non-convex problem with strong couplings among variables is challenging to solve directly. Then, a novel alternating optimization method is proposed, leveraging the successive convex approximation (SCA) and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) techniques. We provide sufficient numerical results to validate the effectiveness of the proposed STOC scheme, which demonstrate that the proposed scheme supported by STAR-RIS and UAV outperforms five benchmark schemes in terms of performance gain. It is important to note that the proposed scheme offers a feasible and realistic way for the implementations of STOC in practical MEC networks.