Intelligent UAV planning for task-offloading with limited buffer and multiple computing servers

Abstract

Dynamically moving Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as an effective means to significantly enhance the flexibility and transmission performance of mobile edge computing (MEC). However, in practical scenarios, UAVs often face limitations in terms of data storage capacity and computational power. In this paper, a UAV-enabled MEC network with multiple users and multiple edge computing servers is proposed, where the UAV is equipped with limited-size buffers. An optimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize UAV flight trajectories, offload server pairings, task offload ratios, and UAV transmit power to minimize transmission delay, computation delay, and system energy consumption. To tackle the intractable non-convex optimization issue, an intelligent optimization algorithm based on Deep Dueling Double Q-Network (D3QN)-Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) is proposed, which is able to efficiently determine the optimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed intelligent algorithm exhibits good convergence and achieves a favorable balance between delay and energy consumption.