Energy-Efficient Task Migration and Path Planning in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing System

Abstract

With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) technology and the advent of the 5G era, the role of UAV-enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) system has attracted much attention, especially in the event of some emergencies. However, considering the limited battery life and computing capabilities of UAVs, it is challenging to provide energy-efficient services for mobile devices. To solve this challenge, we propose an energy-efficient dynamic task migration algorithm (EDTM) that minimizes the total energy consumption of the system while ensuring UAVs system load balance. Based on the improved ant colony algorithm and path elimination strategy, the proposed algorithm comprehensively considers task migration distance between UAVs, the load situation of UAVs, and environmental factors (e.g., wind speed and air density) and finally plans a reasonable task migration path. The simulation results show that the performance of the proposed EDTM is superior to the benchmark schemes.