Joint Offloading and Trajectory Design for UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Systems

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been considered in wireless communication systems to provide high-quality services for their low cost and high maneuverability. This paper addresses a UAV-aided mobile edge computing system, where a number of ground users are served by a moving UAV equipped with computing resources. Each user has computing tasks to complete, which can be separated into two parts: one portion is offloaded to the UAV and the remaining part is implemented locally. The UAV moves around above the ground users and provides computing service in an orthogonal multiple access manner over time. For each time period, we aim to minimize the sum of the maximum delay among all the users in each time slot by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory, the ratio of offloading tasks, and the user scheduling variables, subject to the discrete binary constraints, the energy consumption constraints, and the UAV trajectory constraints. This problem has highly nonconvex objective function and constraints. Therefore, we equivalently convert it into a better tractable form based on introducing the auxiliary variables, and then propose a novel penalty dual decomposition-based algorithm to handle the resulting problem. Furthermore, we develop a simplified l ₀ -norm algorithm with much reduced complexity. Besides, we also extend our algorithm to minimize the average delay. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform the benchmarks.