Resource Allocation and Optimization for UAV-Assisted IoT Based on MEC and Blockchain

Abstract

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been applied widely to provide technical power for the rapid development of the world. However, the lightweight IoT devices can hardly implement complicated applications since they usually have limited computing resource and just can execute some simple computation tasks. Moreover, data transmission and interaction in IoT is another crucial issue when the IoT devices are deployed at remote areas without manual operation. Fortunately, mobile edge computing (MEC) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) provide solutions to these problems. In addition, blockchain is considered and introduced to realize data sharing and ensure data security. Therefore, in this article, we propose an UAV-assisted IoT system integrated with MEC and blockchain, and formulate the optimization problem in the proposed architecture to avoid excessive consumption of energy and computation latency through jointly considering computation offloading decision, spectrum resource allocation and computing resource allocation. Considering this complicated optimization problem, a convex problem which is transformed from the non-convex mixed integer problem is obtained, and then a distributed algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that the validity of this scheme， which reduce the energy consumption and computation latency of the system effectively, and improve the system performance significantly.