Minimizing Age of Information in UAV-Assisted Edge Computing System with Multiple Transmission Modes

Abstract

With the advance of 5G technologies and the development of space-air-ground-sea applications, the fast and efficient collection and processing of the explosive growth of sensing data have become significant and challenging. In this paper, considering the Age of Information (AoI), the limited coverage of Base Stations (BS), and the constrained computation capability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), we propose a hybrid communication framework that utilizes UAVs as relays to optimize the collection of sensing data. We aim to minimize the average AoI of the data among all sensor nodes while considering the energy consumption constraints of sensor nodes, which is formulated as a Mixed Integer NonLinear Programming (MINLP). To address this problem, we decompose it into communication resource allocation and computation resource allocation. Finally, the average AoI of the whole system is minimized and the average energy consumption constraint of sensor nodes is satisfied. The simulation results show that our proposed method can achieve significant performance improvement. In specific, our proposed method can reduce the average AoI by 20%, 11%, and 43% compared to the three counterparts, Data Transmission Directly Algorithm (DTDA), Max Weight Algorithm (MWA), and matching algorithm, respectively.