TJCCT: A Two-Timescale Approach for UAV-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) is emerging as a promising paradigm to provide aerial-terrestrial computing services in close proximity to mobile devices (MDs). However, meeting the demands of computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks for MDs poses several challenges, including the demand-supply contradiction between MDs and MEC servers, the demand-supply discrepancy between MDs and MEC servers, the trajectory control requirements on energy efficiency and timeliness, and the different time-scale dynamics of the network. To address these issues, we first present a hierarchical architecture by incorporating terrestrial-aerial computing capabilities and leveraging UAV flexibility. Furthermore, we formulate a joint computing resource allocation, computation offloading, and trajectory control problem to maximize the system utility. Since the problem is a non-convex and NP-hard mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), we propose a two-timescale joint computing resource allocation, computation offloading, and trajectory control (TJCCT) approach for solving the problem. In the short timescale, we propose a price-incentive model for on-demand computing resource allocation and a matching mechanism-based method for computation offloading. In the long timescale, we propose a convex optimization-based method for UAV trajectory control. Besides, we theoretically prove the stability and polynomial complexity of TJCCT. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed TJCCT is able to achieve superior performances in terms of the system utility, average processing rate, average completion delay, average completion ratio, and average cost, while meeting the energy constraints despite the trade-off of the increased energy consumption.