Security-Aware Designs of Multi-UAV Deployment, Task Offloading and Service Placement in Edge Computing Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising solution to support wireless devices’ computation-intensive services in the absence of terrestrial infrastructures. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous nature of MEC services and the security vulnerability of wireless channels present significant challenges to achieving efficient and secure computation offloading. In this paper, we investigate a multi-UAV-assisted MEC network in which wireless devices need to process diverse computation tasks. The devices can perform local computing or offload their computation tasks to UAV servers that have pre-cached relevant service programs in the presence of eavesdroppers. To facilitate secure service provisioning, we propose a cooperative jamming-based scheme in which a UAV jammer transmits jamming signals to interfere with eavesdroppers during devices’ computation offloading processes. Taking into account UAV servers’ constrained caching spaces and secure offloading requirements, we minimize the total task completion delay of devices by jointly optimizing multi-UAV deployment, task offloading decisions, service placement, UAV jammer’s transmit power, and devices’ transmit power. To tackle the formulated mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, we design an optimization-embedding multi-agent twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (OE-MATD3) algorithm. Specifically, the MATD3 approach is leveraged to deal with optimization variables concerning UAVs, while a closed-form solution for devices’ transmit power is derived and guides MATD3-based decision-making. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms baselines in terms of devices’ task completion delay.