UAV-Assisted Multi-Access Edge Computing: Technologies and Challenges

As the number of end users served by wireless networks continues to grow, modern wireless communication systems have put forward higher requirements for the diversity of wireless network forms. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) wireless network communication system will occupy an important position in the future wireless communication system. With the explosive growth of 5G data traffic and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, computing-intensive, communication-intensive, and delay-sensitive applications have put tremendous pressure on UAV communication systems. Unlike terrestrial communication networks, the inherent characteristics of UAVs make it more troublesome to deal with the above-mentioned difficulties. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) can help mobile devices improve computing and communication capabilities, and its combination with UAVs is also an open subject. This article mainly summarizes the related knowledge and research of MEC and UAV wireless communication systems. We combine the UAV system with MEC technology and try to propose a UAV-assisted MEC wireless communication system. We analyze the key methods to realize this technology and point out a series of possible challenges. This article aims to provide new ideas for the proposed new architecture of aerial computing.

Introduction

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an important part of modern wireless communication network systems; especially in the upcoming 5G era, it will play a pivotal role in the surveillance, medical care, rescue, and military fields. In a UAV wireless communication system, the UAV usually plays the role of an aerial base station (BS) or an aerial mobile terminal. Due to the explosive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) data traffic, no matter what role UAVs assume, they are facing huge challenges brought by computing-intensive, communication-intensive, and delay-sensitive tasks [1]. When a UAV is used as an aerial BS, ground users communicate with the UAV through a line-of-sight link. The link transmission of massive data may cause channel congestion and high transmission costs. In addition, there are also defects in coverage. When a UAV is used as an air mobile terminal, the increase of UAV number will bring a huge burden to the existing cellular frequency band. In addition, UAV spectrum access and ground terminal spectrum access will form a severe competitive relationship, and they will compete for limited spectrum resources. The emergence of many communication quality problems determines that UAV communication alone is no longer suitable for the construction of 5G communication network systems.