Reliability-Optimal UAV-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing: Joint Resource Allocation, Data Transmission Scheduling and Motion Control

Abstract

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a crucial role in mobile edge computing (MEC) within space-air-ground integrated networks. They serve as aerial cloudlets, enabling task processing in close proximity to ground users. While numerous joint trajectory design and resource allocation schemes aim to enhance energy efficiency or computation rate, few focus on improving system reliability, which is often challenged by stochastic channels and node mobility. This paper presents a stochastic modeling perspective to derive a system reliability expression. Our reliability formulation incorporates the impacts of stochastic Line-of-Sight (LoS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) air-to-ground communication channels, application data load, available bandwidth, offloading time, and transmission power. This comprehensive approach leads to a reliability-oriented joint optimization model that considers not only resource allocation and user data transmission scheduling but also the motion of UAVs. To solve this problem, we propose a low-complexity algorithm. By utilizing augmented Lagrangian multipliers, the algorithm transforms nonlinear constraints into a tractable formulation, enabling the utilization of legacy unconstrained optimization techniques. We provide a proof of convergence for this algorithm. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our proposed method guarantees convergence within finite iterations and improves the average communication reliability in comparison with several other joint optimization schemes.