Time allocation improvement method for UAV-based wireless energy transfer cooperative mobile edge

Abstract

Wireless power transfer (WPT) and mobile edge computing (MEC) are two advanced technologies that could improve the computing power and range of mobile devices. However, by integrating the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) into wireless powered MEC systems, wireless energy transfer will be susceptible to the “double near–far” effect. Therefore, in order to further overcome the influence of the “double near–far” effect, this paper considers the optimization of time slot allocation for UAV-assisted wireless powered cooperative MEC system, which includes an access point (UAV) and two mobile devices. The purpose of the study is to minimize the total transmission energy of the UAV while satisfying the delay and size of the computational tasks, so this paper proposed a 2:1:1 time-slot optimization allocation method. The method exploits the synergy of users so that the mobile device which is closer to the UAV acts as an offloading relay, by combining power and time slot optimization to minimize the total energy consumption of the UAV. Compared with the equal time slot scheme before the improvement, this method can not only utilize the wireless transmission energy to charge the mobile device for more time in the first period, but also can save the time of data transmission of the closer device in the third period, and it can enhance the rate of data transmission of the mobile devices at the same time. The results show that the task capacity of the system computed will be increased compared to the original scheme; the total transmission rate of the whole system is also improved by the same order of magnitude. The simulation results verify the effectiveness and reliability of the algorithm of the paper, and the comprehensive performance of the system can be maximized by the flexible offloading algorithm.