Distributed Computation Offloading and Power Control for UAV-Enabled Internet of Medical Things

Abstract

The advancement of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has led to the emergence of various health and emotion care services, e.g., health monitoring. To cater to increasing computational requirements of IoMT services, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as an indispensable technology in smart health. Benefiting from the cost-effectiveness of deployment, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with MEC servers in Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) have emerged as a promising solution for providing smart health services in proximity to medical devices (MDs). However, the escalating number of MDs and the limited availability of communication resources of UAVs give rise to a significant increase in transmission latency. Moreover, due to the limited communication range of UAVs, the geographically-distributed MDs lead to workload imbalance of UAVs, which deteriorates the service response delay. To this end, this paper proposes a UAV-enabled Distributed computation Offloading and Power control method with Multi-Agent, named DOPMA, for NOMA-based IoMT environment. Specifically, this paper introduces computation and transmission queue models to analyze the dynamic characteristics of task execution latency and energy consumption. Moreover, a credit assignment scheme-based reward function is designed considering both system-level rewards and rewards tailored to each MD, and an improved multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm is developed to derive offloading and power control decisions independently. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing schemes, achieving \(7.1\% \) reduction in energy consumption and \(16\% \) decrease in average delay.