Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acts as the aerial mobile edge computing (MEC) node to help the battery-limited Internet of Things (IoT) devices relieve burdens from computation and data collection, and prolong the lifetime of operating. However, IoT devices can ONLY ask UAV for either computing or caching help, and collaborative offloading services of UAV are rarely mentioned in the literature. Moreover, IoT device has multiple mutually independent tasks, which make collaborative offloading policy design even more challenging. Therefore, we investigate a UAV-enabled MEC networks with the consideration of multiple tasks either for computing or caching. Taking the quality of experience (QoE) requirement of time-sensitive tasks into consideration, we aim to minimize the total energy consumption of IoT devices by jointly optimizing trajectory, communication and computing resource allocation at UAV, and task offloading decision at IoT devices. Since this problem has highly non-convex objective function and constraints, we first decompose the original problem into three subproblems named as trajectory optimization (
 $$\mathbf {P}_{\mathbf {T}}$$
 ), resource allocation at UAV (
 $$\mathbf {P}_{\mathbf {R}}$$
 ) and offloading decisions at IoT devices (
 $$\mathbf {P}_{\mathbf {O}}$$
 ) and then propose an iterative algorithm based on block coordinate descent method to cope with them in a sequence. Numerical results demonstrate that collaborative offloading can effectively reduce IoT devices’ energy consumption while meeting different kinds of offloading services, and satisfy the QoE requirement of time-sensitive tasks at IoT devices.

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Collaborative offloading for UAV-enabled time-sensitive MEC networks

Edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning for nowadays, are gradually intersecting to build a novel system, called edge intelligence. However, the development of edge intelligence systems encounters some challenges, and one of these challenges is the \textit{computational gap} between computation-intensive deep learning algorithms and less-capable edge systems. Due to the computational gap, many edge intelligence systems cannot meet the expected performance requirements. To bridge the gap, a plethora of deep learning techniques and optimization methods are proposed in the past years: light-weight deep learning models, network compression, and efficient neural architecture search. Although some reviews or surveys have partially covered this large body of literature, we lack a systematic and comprehensive review to discuss all aspects of these deep learning techniques which are critical for edge intelligence implementation. As various and diverse methods which are applicable to edge systems are proposed intensively, a holistic review would enable edge computing engineers and community to know the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques which are instrumental for edge intelligence and to facilitate the development of edge intelligence systems. This paper surveys the representative and latest deep learning techniques that are useful for edge intelligence systems, including hand-crafted models, model compression, hardware-aware neural architecture search and adaptive deep learning models. Finally, based on observations and simple experiments we conducted, we discuss some future directions.

Bringing AI To Edge: From Deep Learning's Perspective

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising architecture to reduce the energy consumption of mobile devices and provide satisfactory quality-of-service to time-sensitive services. How to jointly optimize task offloading and resource allocation to minimize the energy consumption subject to the latency requirement remains an open problem, which motivates this paper. When the latency constraint is taken into account, the optimization variables, including offloading ratio, transmission power, and subcarrier and computing resource allocation, are strongly coupled. To address this issue, we first decompose the original problem into three subproblems named as offloading ratio selection, transmission power optimization, and subcarrier and computing resource allocation. Then, we propose an iterative algorithm to deal with them in a sequence. To be specific, we derive the closed-form solution of offloading ratios, employ the equivalent parametric convex programming to obtain the optimal power allocation policy, and deal with subcarrier and computing resource allocation by the primal-dual method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can save 20%–40% energy compared with the reference schemes, and can converge to local optimal solutions.

Energy-Aware Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Time-Sensitive Services in Mobile Edge Computing Systems

Natural disasters cause enormous damage and losses every year, both economic and in terms of human lives. It is essential to develop systems to predict disasters and to generate and disseminate timely warnings. Recently, technologies such as the Internet of Things solutions have been integrated into alert systems to provide an effective method to gather environmental data and produce alerts. This work reviews the literature regarding Internet of Things solutions in the field of Early Warning for different natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and landslides. The aim of the paper is to describe the adopted IoT architectures, define the constraints and the requirements of an Early Warning system, and systematically determine which are the most used solutions in the four use cases examined. This review also highlights the main gaps in literature and provides suggestions to satisfy the requirements for each use case based on the articles and solutions reviewed, particularly stressing the advantages of integrating a Fog/Edge layer in the developed IoT architectures.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/6/2124/pdf?version=1646824704

Recent Advances in Internet of Things Solutions for Early Warning Systems: A Review

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used in a high-computation paradigm enabled with smart applications in the Beyond Fifth Generation (B5G) wireless communication networks. These networks have an avenue for generating a considerable amount of heterogeneous data by the expanding number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart environments. However, storing and processing massive data with limited computational capability and energy availability at local nodes in the IoT network has been a significant difficulty, mainly when deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to extract discriminatory information from the massive amount of data for different tasks.Therefore, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has evolved as a promising computing paradigm leveraged with efficient technology to improve the quality of services of edge devices and network performance better than cloud computing networks, addressing challenging problems of latency and computation-intensive offloading in a UAV-assisted framework. This paper provides a comprehensive review of intelligent UAV computing technology to enable 6G networks over smart environments. We highlight the utility of UAV computing and the critical role of Federated Learning (FL) in meeting the challenges related to energy, security, task offloading, and latency of IoT data in smart environments. We present the reader with an insight into UAV computing, advantages, applications, and challenges that can provide helpful guidance for future research.

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Computing in the Sky: A Survey on Intelligent Ubiquitous Computing for UAV-Assisted 6G Networks and Industry 4.0/5.0

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged to provide data processing and caching in the infrastructure-less areas. However, the limited battery capacity of UAV constrains its endurance time, and makes energy efficiency one of the top priorities in implementing UAV-enabled MEC architecture. In this backdrop, we aim to minimize the UAV’s energy consumption by jointly optimizing its trajectory and resource allocation, and task decision and bits scheduling of users considering fairness. The problem is formulated as a mix-integer nonlinear programming problem with strongly coupled variants, and further transformed into three more tractable subproblems: 1) Trajectory optimization PT, 2) Task Decision and Bits Scheduling PS, 3) Resource allocation PR. Then, we propose an iterative algorithm to deal with them in a sequence, and further design a penalty methodbased algorithm to reduce computation complexity when the branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithm incurs a high complexity to solve PS. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can efficiently reduce the energy consumption of UAV, and help save 17.7% -54.6% and 78.9% -91.9% energy compared with Equal Resource Allocation and Random Resource Allocation. Moreover, it reduces more than 88% running time and achieves relatively satisfactory performance compared with B&B.

Fairness-Aware Task Scheduling and Resource Allocation in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Networks

In this paper, we investigate offloading scheme and resource allocation strategy for Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based multi-access edge computing (MEC) network to minimize the total system energy consumption. Partial data offloading is studied where mobile date can be computed at both local devices and the edge cloud with the consideration of time-sensitive tasks for users. Since the NP-hardness of the considered optimization problem, we propose an iterative algorithm to decide the proportion of data to offload and design the resource allocation strategy in a sequence. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance than the reference schemes.

Joint Offloading and Resource Allocation for Time-Sensitive Multi-Access Edge Computing Network

Mobile edge computing (MEC) provides users with a high quality experience (QoE) by placing servers with rich services close to the end users. Compared with local computing, MEC can contribute to energy saving, but results in increased communication latency. In this paper, we jointly optimize task offloading and resource allocation to minimize the energy consumption in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)-based MEC networks, where the time-sensitive tasks can be processed at both local users and MEC server via partial offloading. Since the optimization variables of the problem are strongly coupled, we first decompose the original problem into two subproblems named as offloading selection (PO), and subcarriers and computing resource allocation (PS), and then propose an iterative algorithm to deal with them in a sequence. To be specific, we derive the closed-form solution for PO, and deal with PS by an alternating way in the dual domain due to its NP-hardness. Simulation results demonstrate

Wen-Tao Li

Papers

Collaborative offloading for UAV-enabled time-sensitive MEC networks

Energy-Aware Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Time-Sensitive Services in Mobile Edge Computing Systems

Fairness-Aware Task Scheduling and Resource Allocation in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Networks

Joint Offloading and Resource Allocation for Time-Sensitive Multi-Access Edge Computing Network

Energy Minimization for Mobile Edge Computing Networks with Time-Sensitive Constraints