Optimizing Multi-UAV Deployment in 3-D Space to Minimize Task Completion Time in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Systems

Abstract

In Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) systems, UAVs can carry edge servers to help ground user equipment (UEs) offloading their computing tasks to the UAVs for execution. This letter aims to minimize the total time required for the UAVs to complete the offloaded tasks, while optimizing the three-dimensional (3-D) deployment of UAVs, including their flying height and horizontal positions. Although the formulated optimization is a mixed integer nonlinear programming, we convert it to a convex problem and develop a successive convex approximation (SCA) based algorithm to effectively solve it. The simulation results show that the joint optimization of the horizontal and the vertical position of a group of UAVs can achieve better performance than the traditional algorithms.