Cooperative Task Offloading in UAV Swarm-based Edge Computing

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as a promising technology to meet ever-increasing demands on computational resources. Due to the fixed deployment and limited coverage of conventional MEC, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) edge computing began to receive attention with the advantage of flexibility and controllability. However, single UAV edge computing is not competent for complex scenarios with the limitations of computing capability and coverage. Further-more, although multi-UAV edge computing could improve the situation, the long processing delay and insufficient utilization of resources still restrict the communication and cooperative computation among UAVs. Characterized by the unique swarm cooperative communication and computing, UAV swarm-based edge computing can realize more complex task computing and higher computational efficiency. Toward this end, we provide this paper to study the cooperative task offloading problem in UAV swarm-based edge computing, aiming to minimize the overall task processing delay. To solve this problem, we adopt an optimal cooperative computation offloading method. Experimental results demonstrate the importance and high performance of UAV swarm-based edge computation and the low complexity of our proposed method.