Reinforcement Learning-Based Deadline and Battery-Aware Offloading in Smart Farm IoT-UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with mounted base stations are a promising technology for monitoring smart farms. They can provide communication and computation services to extensive agricultural regions. With the assistance of a Multi-Access Edge Computing infrastructure, an aerial base station (ABS) network can provide an energy-efficient solution for smart farms that need to process deadline critical tasks fed by IoT devices deployed on the field. In this paper, we introduce a multi-objective maximization problem and a Q-Learning based method which aim to process these tasks before their deadline while considering the UAVs’ hover time. We also present three heuristic baselines to evaluate the performance of our approaches. In addition, we introduce an integer linear programming (ILP) model to define the upper bound of our objective function. The results show that Q-Learning outperforms the baselines in terms of remaining energy levels and percentage of delay violations.