Weighted Energy-Efficiency Maximization for a UAV-Assisted Multiplatoon Mobile-Edge Computing System

With the rapid development of mobile computing, mobile-edge computing (MEC) has increasingly become an essential means to meet the computing power requirements of intelligent networked vehicles. However, users with high mobility and coupled dynamics are rarely considered in the edge computing paradigms. In this article, we studied a UAV-assisted MEC system with multiplatoon vehicles. Our article aims to maximize the system’s weighted global energy efficiency, which can flexibly adjust each vehicle’s energy consumption according to user preferences and system needs. In particular, we design a controller for platooning vehicles based on a 2-D path-following model and Frenet frames, and model the coupled characteristics of air-to-ground communications and onboard computation. Furthermore, due to the nonconvexity of the objective function and constraints of the optimization problem, we propose an optimization algorithm based on the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. The simulation results show that the proposed method significantly surpasses conventional schemes.