Multi-UAV Cooperative Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in 5G Advanced and Beyond

In 5G advanced and beyond, latency-critical and computation-intensive applications require more communication and computing resources. However, remote areas without available terrestrial edge/cloud infrastructure fail to satisfy these applications’ demands. This motivates the emergence of the UAV-enabled aerial computing paradigm. Single UAV-enabled aerial computing (SUEAC) is limited by small coverage area and insufficient resources, which cannot meet the application requirements. Multiple UAV-enabled aerial computing (MUEAC) has broken through the limitation of SUEAC and has attracted wide attention. Cooperation among multiple UAVs in MUEAC can fully utilize UAV resources and achieve load balancing. Furthermore, for divisible tasks with data-dependent characteristics, using partial offloading makes task scheduling more flexible compared to binary offloading, thus reducing task processing delay. Therefore, we propose a software defined networking enhanced cooperative MUEAC system. To minimize the processing delay of divisible tasks, we study the problem of joint task scheduling and computing resource allocation under task data dependency and UAV energy consumption constraints. To solve the non-convex problem, a multi-UAV cooperative communication and computing optimization (MCCCO) scheme is proposed. Experimental results corroborate that MCCCO can achieve better performance in task processing delay reduction and load balancing on UAV energy consumption than the traditional schemes.