Joint Communication and Computation Design for UAV-Enabled Aerial Computing

Abstract

Wireless communication with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has appeared as a promising technique for many application scenarios in future communication networks. In this article, we provide a vision of four UAV-enabled aerial computing (AC) architectures. Specifically, these architectures have attracted growing attention in recent years for decreasing data processing delay and enhancing computation performance via integrating UAVs into AC systems. We first study the benefits and application scenarios of UAV-enabled AC networks. Then we emphasize the efficient computation and communication design of UAV-enabled AC networks by discussing the potential research issues and key design considerations in a comprehensive manner. In addition, extensive case study simulations show the performance superiority of UAV-enabled AC networks over conventional infrastructure-based mobile edge computing networks. To provide an instructive guide for future research work, we discuss the technical challenges and open issues.