Computational offloading into UAV swarm networks: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms have emerged as a promising technology for various applications, such as delivery, surveillance, and infrastructure inspection. An additional feature of deploying large UAV swarms is their use in mobile offloading networking. At the same time, this implies a key challenge in the efficient management of the computational and networking requirements for these offloading processes. This paper aims to fill this gap through a systematic literature review (SLR) analysing the research on distributed task offloading in UAV swarms. We conducted a systematic search of major scientific databases to identify relevant literature published between 2019 and 2023. A total of 63 papers were selected through a multistage screening process and their key contributions. This SLR aims to provide the current state of research on UAV swarm task offloading, including considerations for computation offloading, the role of UAV swarms, different aspects of UAV swarms, the number of UAVs in swarms impacting performance, and open issues. Our review also highlights UAV swarm offloading in various domains and discusses the challenges and limitations that must be addressed to ensure the widespread adoption of this technology. We outline the future research directions and potential applications of UAV swarm offloading, including its integration with other technologies.