Joint Power and Deployment Optimization for Multi-UAV Remote Edge Computing

Driven by the dramatic growth in computing capability and the inherent mobility of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the recently advocated UAV edge computing paradigm is expected to enhance the coverage and the on-demand deployment capability of existing terrestrial edge computing systems. Nonetheless, due to the limited onboard resource of the UAV, single- UAV edge computing systems may still be incompetent when serving remote users. Although using multiple UAVs to form a traditional relay network is a viable solution to remote edge computing, it fails to exploit the computing capability of the UAVs. This entails a pressing need to develop multi-UAV remote edge computing mechanisms that allow the UAVs to handle part of the computation tasks using their local processors while conducting multi-hop computation task offloading. To achieve the best performance in such cases, the UAVs have to properly split their power budget for communication and computation and also move to suitable service locations. Nonetheless, finding the optimal UAV power allocation and deployment turns out to be an intractable high-dimensional monotonic optimization problem, even for a mild number of UAVs. To overcome this challenge, a more efficient algorithm that has a complexity only linear in the number of UAVs is developed by exploiting the special structure of this problem. In addition to analysis, numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.