A Holistic Service Provision Strategy for Drone-as-a-Service in MEC-based UAV Delivery

With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT), Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is becoming the major platform for many smart systems such as smart logistics, smart healthcare, and smart transportation, given its lower latency and higher reliability compared with centralized cloud computing. There is a growing interest in Drone-as-a-Service in recent years which enables the MEC-based smart UAV delivery system. However, most existing works on Drone-as-a-Service focus on the static service composition or the dynamic service provisioning, rather than a holistic service provisioning strategy for the entire UAV delivery process. In this paper, we propose a holistic service provisioning strategy for Drone-as-a-Service in MEC-based UAV delivery to address such an issue. Specifically, a MEC-based UAV relay delivery system framework (RDS) is designed, which considers both the static stage for provisioning delivery services and the dynamic stage for provisioning computing services. Based on the service models for both static and dynamic stages, an energy-efficient service provision strategy (ESP-GA) for MEC-based UAV last-mile delivery is proposed, which aims to minimize the overall energy consumption under deadline constraints. Through the simulation experiments based on a prototype UAV delivery system, the experimental results have successfully demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed holistic strategy in comparison with several representative service provisioning strategies.