Provisioning edge computing services in urban areas through the chaining of unmanned aerial vehicles: A genetic approach

Abstract

AbstractEdge computing has been proved an efficient approach to provisioning computation offloading service to vehicles on road through Road‐Side Units (RSUs). However, the traffic volume on road is highly dynamic, while RSU‐based edge servers are static in terms of geographical location and computation capacity. To address this problem, this paper proposes a mobile edge server placement strategy using cruising UAVs along the roads based on the genetic algorithm. A mathematical model is first built to characterize the deployment cost of these UAV‐mounted servers and their routes. Next, a heuristic UAV‐mounted edge server deployment scheme based on K‐medoid clustering and genetic algorithms is designed. Experimental results verify that the proposed UAV deployment scheme satisfies the offloading demand of IoV nodes while reducing the total deployment cost by 17.05–48.94% compared with existing popular approaches.