Abstract
With proliferation of smart devices and wireless applications, the recent few years have witnessed data surge. These massive data needs to be stored, transmitted, and processed in time to exploit their value for decision making. Conventional cloud computing requires transmission of massive amount of data in and out of core network, which can lead to longer service latency and potential traffic congestion. As a new platform, mobile edge computing (MEC) moves computation and storage resources to edge network in proximity to the data source. With MEC, data can be processed locally, and thus mitigate issues of latency and congestion. However, it is very challenging to reap the benefits of MEC everywhere due to geographic constraints, expensive deployment cost, and immoveable base stations. Because of easy deployment and high mobility of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), air-ground integrated mobile edge networks (AGMEN) is proposed, where UAVs are employed to assist the MEC network. Such an AGMEN expects to provide MEC services ubiquitously and reliably. In this article, we first introduce the characteristics and components of UAV. Then, we will review the applications, key challenges, and current research technologies of AGMEN, from perspectives of communication, computation, and caching, respectively. Finally, we will discuss some essential research directions for AGMEN.
Highlights
Driven by Internet of Things (IoT) and prevail of mobile networks, the number of wireless connected devices has been dramatically increased
MOTIVATION AND ORGANIZATION the aforementioned papers have extensively explored mobile edge computing (MEC) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-assisted communication networks separately, there are no surveys on air-ground integrated mobile edge networks (AGMEN)
OVERVIEW OF AIR-GROUND INTEGRATED MOBILE EDGE NETWORKS we introduce a comprehensive architecture of AGMEN, where communication resources, computation resources, and caching resources of air and ground network are integrated
Summary
Driven by Internet of Things (IoT) and prevail of mobile networks, the number of wireless connected devices has been dramatically increased. By integrating UAV in MEC networks, an air-ground integrated mobile edge network (AGMEN) can be formed, in which UAVs can either act as flying base stations(BS) and relays to improve communication service or work as an edge sever in air to execute computation tasks from ground users or other UAVs. Besides that, UAV can provide the caching function to store popular contents [26] with equipped cache storage units. B. MOTIVATION AND ORGANIZATION the aforementioned papers have extensively explored MEC and UAV-assisted communication networks separately, there are no surveys on AGMEN. To best of our knowledge, this article is the first tutorial/survey to offer a comprehensive review of AGMEN It is of great significance and complicated to integrate communication, computation, and caching, in which new network topology, new organization mechanism, and new standardization are required to be defined.
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