Stackelberg game‐based task offloading in mobile edge computing‐enabled hierarchical multi‐coalition unmanned aerial vehicle networks

Abstract

Summary The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) coalition networks have been widely used in emergency mission scenarios. The introduction of the mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm into multi‐coalition UAV networks further improves the mission processing performance of UAV coalitions. In this paper, we investigate the problem of minimizing total task processing delay of UAV members in MEC‐enabled coalition‐based UAV networks. First, we propose a hierarchical offloading model in which multiple UAV heads decide its position selection strategy and multiple UAV members decide its offloading strategy when offloading tasks to UAV heads. Considering data arrival from multiple UAV member nodes at each UAV head, the first come first served (FCFS) queuing model is introduced when the UAV head processes tasks from members. Second, the hierarchical offloading delay minimization problem is formulated as a multi‐leader multi‐follower Stackelberg game. The existence of a Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) is proved by showing that multi‐leader subgame and multi‐follower subgame are exact potential games (EPGs) with Nash equilibrium (NE). We design a best response‐based hierarchical iterative offloading algorithm to solve SE. Finally, the simulation results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is better than that of other benchmark methods and the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the total delay for all UAV members.