Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation in Multi-UAV-Assisted Two-Stage Edge Computing for Beyond 5G Networks

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted multi-access edge computing (MEC) has become one promising solution for energy-constrained devices to meet the computation demand and the stringent delay requirement. In this work, we investigate a multiple UAVs-assisted two-stage MEC system in which the computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks of mobile devices (MDs) are cooperatively executed on both MEC-enabled UAVs and terrestrial base station (TBS) attached with the MEC server. Specifically, UAVs provide the computing and relaying services to the mobile devices. In this regard, we formulate a joint task offloading, communication and computation resource allocation problem to minimize the energy consumption of MDs and UAVs by considering the limited communication resources for the uplink transmission, the computation resources of UAVs and the tolerable latency of the tasks. The formulated problem is a mixed-integer non-convex problem which is NP hard. Thus, we relax the channel assignment variable from the binary to continuous values. However, the problem is still non-convex due to the coupling among the variables. To solve the formulated optimization problem, we apply the Block Successive Upper-bound Minimization (BSUM) method which guarantees to obtain the stationary points of the non-convex objective function. In essence, the non-convex objective function is decomposed into multiple subproblems which are then solved in a block-by-block manner. Finally, the extensive evaluation results are conducted to show the superior performance of our proposed framework.