Joint Optimization of Trajectory and Task Offloading for Cellular-Connected Multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Since the computing capacity and battery energy of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are constrained, UAV as aerial user is hard to handle the high computational complexity and time-sensitive applications. This paper investigates a cellular-connected multi-UAV network supported by mobile edge computing. Multiple UAVs carrying tasks fly from a given initial position to a termination position within a specified time. To handle the large number of tasks carried by UAVs, we propose a energy cost of all UAVs based problem to determine how many tasks should be offloaded to high-altitude balloons (HABs) for computing, where UAV-HAB association, the trajectory of UAV, and calculation task splitting are jointly optimized. However, the formulated problem has nonconvex structure. Hence, an efficient iterative algorithm by applying successive convex approximation and the block coordinate descent methods is put forward. Specifically, in each iteration, the UAV-HAB association, calculation task splitting, and UAV trajec-tory are alternately optimized. Especially, for the nonconvex UAV trajectory optimization problem, an approximate convex optimization problem is settled. The numerical results indicate that the scheme of this paper proposed is guaranteed to converge and also significantly reduces the entire power consumption of all UAVs compared to the benchmark schemes.