Incentive UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Based on Microwave Power Transmission

Abstract

With the increasing requirements of the flexible and delay-sensitive computing services, UAV has attracted widespread attention for assisting mobile edge computing (MEC) system. However, due to the limited battery capacity, the UAV cannot always fly and serve the users in the air. To address this issue, a UAV-enabled MEC system based on microwave power transmission is proposed in this paper. In this system, the UAV periodically and continually flies over the users' area to provide computing services and will be charged over the microwave station. Considering profit-centric MEC service provider, the UAV will charge fees from users for the computation services. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the service utility of the UAV by finding the optimal UAV's trajectory, computation offloading decisions and offloading duration. Since the proposed optimization problem is non-convex, the original problem is decomposed into three sub-problems and a three-stage alternative algorithm is presented to solve them iteratively. The numerical results show that the proposed offloading method can achieve better performance than other baseline methods.

Keywords

• UAV-enabled mobile edge computing
• computation offloading
• microwave power transmission