UDCO-SAGiMEC: Joint UAV Deployment and Computation Offloading for Space–Air–Ground Integrated Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Computation-intensive applications offloading is challenging, especially in the designated regions where communication infrastructure is absent or compromised. In this paper, we present a Space–Air–Ground integrated Mobile Edge Computing (SAGiMEC) system for these regions to provide quality computational services, where the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) act as in-fight edge servers to provide low-latency edge computing and the satellite provides resident cloud computing. A joint optimization problem is formulated considering UAV deployment, ground device (GD) access, and computation offloading to minimize the system average response latency. To cope with the problem’s complexity, we propose a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Greedy Strategy (GS)-based algorithm (PSO&GS) to obtain an approximate optimal solution. Extensive simulations validate the convergence of the proposed algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed approach has excellent convergence, and the system average response latency is about 0.65x–0.85x that of the benchmark algorithm.

Keywords

• space–air–ground integrated
• mobile edge computing
• UAV deployment
• device access
• computation offloading