Power optimization in UAV-based wireless power transmission and collaborative MEC IoT networks

Internet of Things (IoT) devices will generate massive fragmented data that requires real-time computing and intelligent analysis, which makes it facing the challenge of insufficient computing resources and limited battery energy. With the assistance of mobile edge computing (MEC), IoT devices can offload computing tasks to the MEC server to reduce their computing pressure. Cooperation between devices and wireless power transmission technology (WPT) can be used to solve the problem of limited battery energy. Moreover, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the WPT-MEC system can improve signal coverage and energy collection efficiency. In this paper, we propose an UAV-based wireless power transmission and collaborative MEC scheme for IoT networks, in which IoT devices utilize different subcarriers to transmit the information. We aim to minimize UAV’s transmitting power via optimizing the transmitting power of IoT devices with the constraints of delay and offloading task size. The performance of the proposed scheme is verified by simulation results.