Dynamic Computation Offloading Based on Q-Learning for UAV-Based Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Emerging mobile edge computing (MEC) can be used in battery-constrained Internet of things (IoT). The execution latency of IoT applications can be improved by offloading computation-intensive tasks to an MEC server. Recently, the popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased rapidly, and UAV-based MEC systems are receiving considerable attention. In this paper, we propose a dynamic computation offloading paradigm for UAV-based MEC systems, in which a UAV flies over an urban environment and provides edge services to IoT devices on the ground. Since most IoT devices are energy-constrained, we formulate our problem as a Markov decision process considering the energy level of the battery of each IoT device. We also use model-free Q-learning for time-critical tasks to maximize the system utility. According to our performance study, the proposed scheme can achieve desirable convergence properties and make intelligent offloading decisions.