Energy‐aware decision‐making for dynamic task migration in MEC‐based unmanned aerial vehicle delivery system

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in many smart systems such as smart logistics, smart agriculture, and environmental monitoring systems. However, the limited computing capability and restricted battery lifetime of existing UAVs could significantly impact the quality of service (QoS) of UAV‐based smart systems and the quality of experience (QoE) of end users. Recently, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) which provisions computing resources close to the mobile end devices has become a promising solution. However, since high‐speed UAV often flies through the signal range of the different edge nodes, the interruption of services in the MEC‐based UAV delivery system is a critical issue. A challenging question is when and how to perform dynamic task migration among the edge nodes to ensure service continuity. In this paper, we investigate the task migration issue for multiple UAVs in the MEC‐based UAV delivery system. Specifically, we propose an energy‐aware decision‐making strategy for the dynamic task migration named GAD to optimize the UAV energy consumption. Given the real‐time system status and QoS constraints, and through a dynamic two‐tier decision‐making mechanism, GAD can efficiently make the task migration decision from four candidate decisions, viz. No Migration, Data Migration Only, Cold Migration, and Live Migration. Experimental results based on a real‐world scenario show that our strategy can well outperform other baseline strategies in various metrics including the flying distances and the energy consumption of UAVs.