Vehicle Assisted Computing Offloading for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Smart City

Smart city emerges a promising paradigm for improving operational efficiency of city and comfort of people. With embedded multi-sensors, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) hold great potential for collecting sensing data and providing social services in smart city. However, due to the limited battery lifetime and processing capacities of UAVs, the efficient offloading scheme of UAVs is urgently needed in smart city. Therefore, in this article, a vehicle-assisted computing offloading architecture for UAVs is proposed to improve offloading efficiency by harnessing the moving vehicles in smart city. We first develop an offloading model for UAVs to determine the offloading strategy. Next, to select the optimal vehicles for offloading, we formulate a matching scheme based on the preference lists of UAVs and vehicles to derive the optimal matching between UAVs and vehicles. After that, to improve the offloading efficiency and maximize the utilities of UAVs and vehicles, the transaction process of computing data between UAVs and vehicles is modeled as a bargaining game. Moreover, an offloading algorithm for UAVs and vehicles is proposed to obtain the optimal strategy. Finally, simulations are performed to validate the efficiency of the proposed offloading scheme. The results demonstrate that the proposed offloading scheme can significantly save resource and improve the utilities of UAVs and vehicles.