UAV-Assisted Relaying and MEC Networks: Resource Allocation and 3D Deployment
Yu Xu, Tiankui Zhang, Dingcheng Yang, Lin Xiao
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has the potential to support the terminal devices (TDs) performing the mobile edge computing (MEC) in Internet of Things (IoT). This paper investigates a UAV-assisted relaying and MEC network, in which the UAV acts as a MEC server to assist computation for the computation-hungry TDs, and also as a relay to deliver the sub-tasks to a ground access point (AP) for execution. We aim to minimize the task completion time of the network by jointly optimizing the communication bandwidth, UAV transmit power, computation resource, task partition, and UAV's three-dimensional (3D) location deployment. Although the formulated problem is complex and non-convex, it is decomposed into three low-complex subproblems, and then efficiently solved by the proposed successive convex approximation (SCA) based joint optimization algorithm. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that: 1) a superior convergence is achieved by the proposed algorithm; 2) the 3D deployment optimization extremely contributes to the performance enhancement; 3) the task completion time is dramatically reduced by applying the proposed algorithm, compared to the benchmark schemes.