A Computation Offloading Scheme for UAV-Edge Cloud Computing Environments Considering Energy Consumption Fairness

Abstract

A heterogeneous computing environment has been widely used with UAVs, edge servers, and cloud servers operating in tandem. Various applications can be allocated and linked to the computing nodes that constitute this heterogeneous computing environment. Efficiently offloading and allocating computational tasks is essential, especially in these heterogeneous computing environments with differentials in processing power, network bandwidth, and latency. In particular, UAVs, such as drones, operate using minimal battery power. Therefore, energy consumption must be considered when offloading and allocating computational tasks. This study proposed an energy consumption fairness-aware computational offloading scheme based on a genetic algorithm (GA). The proposed method minimized the differences in energy consumption by allocating and offloading tasks evenly among drones. Based on performance evaluations, our scheme improved the efficiency of energy consumption fairness, as compared to previous approaches, such as Liu et al.’s scheme. We showed that energy consumption fairness was improved by up to 120%.