Energy-Efficient Resource Management in UAV-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been deployed to enhance the network capacity and provide services to mobile users with or without infrastructure coverage. At the same time, we have observed the exponential growth in Internet of Things (IoTs) devices and applications. However, as IoT devices have limited computation capacity and battery lifetime, it is challenging to process data locally on the devices. To this end, in this letter, a UAV-aided mobile edge computing system is proposed. The problem to jointly minimize the energy consumption at the IoT devices and the UAVs during task execution is studied by optimizing the task offloading decision, resource allocation mechanism and UAV's trajectory while considering the communication and computation latency requirements. A non-convex structure of the formulated problem is revealed and shown to be challenging to solve. To address this challenge, a block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM) algorithm is introduced. Finally, simulation results are provided to show the efficiency of our proposed algorithm.