Efficient offloading mechanism for UAVs-based value added services

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to be used everywhere to provision different services and applications, impacting different aspects of our daily lives. Basically, UAVs are characterized by their high mobility. Some may remain motionless for a specific time to perform pre-programmed missions. Whilst UAVs would be used for specific applications, they could additionally offer numerous IoT (Internet of Things) value-added services (VAS) when they are equipped with suitable IoT devices. Many IoT VAS applications require high amount of resources and/or diverse IoT devices that cannot be offered by a single UAV. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper aims to explore, i) the diversity of IoT devices on-board UAVs, and ii) the mobility of UAVs for offering UAVs-based IoT VAS. Two solutions are proposed for carrying out different IoT VAS. Both solutions are modeled using linear integer programming. While the first solution aims to reduce the energy consumption, the second one aims to shorten the response time. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of both solutions in achieving their design goals.