A survey on intelligent computation offloading and pricing strategy in UAV-Enabled MEC network: Challenges and research directions

The lack of resource constraints for edge servers makes it difficult to simultaneously perform a large number of Mobile Devices’ (MDs) requests. The Mobile Network Operator (MNO) must then select how to delegate MD queries to its Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) server in order to maximize the overall benefit of admitted requests with varying latency needs. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Artificial Intelligent (AI) can increase MNO performance because of their flexibility in deployment, high mobility of UAV, and efficiency of AI algorithms. There is a trade-off between the cost incurred by the MD and the profit received by the MNO. Intelligent computing offloading to UAV-enabled MEC, on the other hand, is a promising way to bridge the gap between MDs' limited processing resources, as well as the intelligent algorithms that are utilized for computation offloading in the UAV-MEC network and the high computing demands of upcoming applications. This study looks at some of the research on the benefits of computation offloading process in the UAV-MEC network, as well as the intelligent models that are utilized for computation offloading in the UAV-MEC network. In addition, this article examines several intelligent pricing techniques in different structures in the UAV-MEC network. Finally, this work highlights some important open research issues and future research directions of Artificial Intelligent (AI) in computation offloading and applying intelligent pricing strategies in the UAV-MEC network

Unmanned aerial vehicles optimal airtime estimation for energy aware deployment in IoT-enabled fifth generation cellular networks

[EN] Cellular networks based on new generation standards are the major enabler for Internet of things (IoT) communication. Narrowband-IoT and Long Term Evolution for Machines are the newest wide area network-based cellular technologies for IoT applications. The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has gained the popularity in cellular networks by using temporary ubiquitous coverage in the areas where the infrastructure-based networks are either not available or have vanished due to some disasters. The major challenge in such networks is the efficient UAVs deployment that covers maximum users and area with the minimum number of UAVs. The performance and sustainability of UAVs is largely dependent upon the available residual energy especially in mission planning. Although energy harvesting techniques and efficient storage units are available, but these have their own constraints and the limited onboard energy still severely hinders the practical realization of UAVs. This paper employs neglected parameters of UAVs energy consumption in order to get actual status of available energy and proposed a solution that more accurately estimates the UAVs operational airtime. The proposed model is evaluated in test bed and simulation environment where the results show the consideration of such explicit usage parameters achieves significant improvement in airtime estimation.The research is funded by the Department of Computer Science, Iqra University, Islamabad Campus, PakistanMajeed, S.; Sohail, A.; Qureshi, KN.; Kumar, A.; Iqbal, S.; Lloret, J. (2020). Unmanned aerial vehicles optimal airtime estimation for energy aware deployment in IoT-enabled fifth generation cellular networks. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking. 2020(1):1-14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13638-020-01877-01142020

Resource allocation, user association and placement for uav-assisted communications

In the past few years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted heterogeneous network has attracted significant attention due to its wide range of applications, such as disaster rescue and recovery, ground macro base station (MBS) traffic offloading, communications for temporary events, and data collection for further processing in Internet of Things (IoT). A UAV can act as a flying base station (BS) to quickly recover the communication coverage in the disaster area when the regular terrestrial infrastructure is malfunctioned. The UAV-assisted heterogeneous network can effectively provision line of sight (LoS) communication links and therefore can mitigate potential signal shadowing and blockage. The regulation relaxation and cost reduction of UAVs as well as communication equipment miniaturization make the practical deployment of highly mobile wireless relays more feasible than before. In fact, the 3GPP Rel-16 has included UAV-enabled wireless communications in the new radio standard, aiming to boost capacity and coverage of fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. However, the performance of UAV-assisted communications is greatly affected by the resource allocation scheme, user association policy and the UAV placement strategy. Also, the limited on-board energy and flight time of the UAV poses a great challenge on designing a robust and reliable UAV-enabled IoT network. To maximize the throughput in the UAV-assisted mobile access network, an optimization problem which determines the 3D UAV deployment and resource allocation in a given hotspot area under the constraints of user Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and total available resources is formulated. First, the primal problem is decomposed into two subproblems, i.e., the 3D UAV placement problem and the resource allocation problem. Second, a cyclic iterative algorithm which solves the two sub-problems separately and uses the output of one as the input of the other is proposed. An optimization problem that aims to minimize the average latency ratio of all users is formulated by determining the 3D location of the UAV, the user association and the bandwidth allocation policy between the MBS and the drone base station (DBS) with the constraint of each user’s QoS requirement and total available bandwidth. The formulated problem is a mixed integer non-convex optimization problem, a very challenging and difficult problem. To make formulated problem tractable, it is decomposed into two subproblems, i.e., the user association and bandwidth allocation problem and the 3D DBS placement problem. These two subproblems are alternatively optimized until no performance improvement can be further achieved. To address the challenge of limited on-board battery capacity and flight time, a tethered UAV (TUAV)-assisted heterogeneous network where the aerial UAV is connected with a ground charging station (GCS) through a tether is proposed. The objective of the formulated problem is to maximize the sum rate of all users by jointly optimizing the user association, resource allocation and placement of the GCSs and the aerial UAVs, constrained by each user’s QoS requirement and the total available resource. Since the primal problem is highly non-convex and non-linear and thus challenging to solve, it is decomposed into three subproblems, i.e., the TUAV placement problem, the resource allocation problem and the user association problem. Then, the three sub-problems are alternately and iteratively optimized by using the outputs of the first two as the input for the third. The future work comprises two parts. First, IoT devices usually are generally deployed at remote areas with limited battery capacities and computing power. Therefore, the generated data needs to be offloaded to a more powerful computing server for further processing. Unfortunately, the trajectory design in UAV data collection is generally NP-hard and difficult to obtain the optimal solution. Advances of machine learning (ML) provide a promising alternative approach to solve such problems that cannot be solved by traditional optimization methods. Hence, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is proposed to be explored to obtain a near optimal solution. Second, the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks will revolutionize traditional communication networks with their promising benefits of service continuity, wide-area coverage, and availability for critical communications and emerging applications. However, the integration of LEO satellite networks and terrestrial networks will be another future research endeavor