Online UAV-Mounted Edge Server Dispatching for Mobile-to-Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been considered as a promising technology to handle computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, such as smart city and smart tourism. However, due to user mobility, edge servers with fixed deployment are not flexible enough to handle time-varying user tasks in hot-spot areas. In this article, a novel online unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted edge server dispatching scheme is proposed to provide flexible mobile-to-MEC services. UAVs are dispatched to the appropriate hover locations by geographically merging tasks into several hot-spot areas. Theoretical analysis guarantees the worst case performance bound. Extensive evaluation driven by real-world mobile requests shows that while maintaining a good latency fairness, the mobile server dispatching scheme can serve more user equipments (UEs) as well as achieve a high resource utilization. Moreover, the hybrid scheme can satisfy even more user demands while dispatching fewer UAVs with a higher server utilization.