Stochastic Coded Offloading Scheme for Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicle-Assisted Edge Computing

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained wide research interests due to their technological advancement and high mobility. The UAVs are equipped with increasingly advanced capabilities to run computationally intensive applications enabled by machine learning techniques. However, because of both energy and computation constraints, the UAVs face issues hovering in the sky while performing computation due to weather uncertainty. To overcome the computation constraints, the UAVs can partially or fully offload their computation tasks to the edge servers. In ordinary computation offloading operations, the UAVs can retrieve the result from the returned output. Nevertheless, if the UAVs are unable to retrieve the entire result from the edge servers, i.e., straggling edge servers, this operation will fail. In this article, we propose a coded distributed computing (CDC) approach for computation offloading to mitigate straggling edge servers. The UAVs can retrieve the returned result when the number of returned copies is greater than or equal to the recovery threshold. There is a shortfall if the returned copies are less than the recovery threshold. To minimize the cost of the network, energy consumption by the UAVs, and prevent over and under subscription of the resources, we devise a two-phase stochastic coded offloading scheme (SCOS). In the first phase, the appropriate UAVs are allocated to the charging stations amid weather uncertainty. In the second phase, we use the
$z$
-stage stochastic integer programming (SIP) to optimize the number of computation subtasks offloaded and computed locally, while taking into account the computation shortfall and demand uncertainty. By using a real data set, the simulation results show that our proposed scheme is fully dynamic and minimizes the cost of the network and UAV energy consumption amid stochastic uncertainties.