An Efficient Online Task Offloading Algorithm for Bilevel UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing
Biao Xiao, Zheng Kun Yao, Li Zhang, Baoxian Zhang, Cheng Li · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2025
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) enabled Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been an attractive paradigm for providing flexible and high-quality offloading services to ground users. In this paper, we study a hierarchical aerial MEC network architecture for improved quality of user experiences. Specifically, we study a bilevel UAV-enabled MEC network where a fixed-wing UAV (F-UAV) and multiple rotor UAVs (R-UAVs) are jointly deployed to provide continuous MEC services to ground users with dynamic demands. We formulate a long-term optimization problem for minimizing the utility of all users while considering the stability of task queue backlogs and energy consumption budgets at users and R-UAVs, where user utility measures the per-slot task processing performance at user side. We apply Lyapunov optimization technique to decompose the original problem into deterministic per-slot optimization subproblems. We derive the optimal offloading conditions at different types of edge nodes. We accordingly propose a Bilevel UAVs based Online Task processing and Resource allocation Algorithm (BOTRA) for determining the offloading and local processing profiles at users. Extensive simulation experiment results show the high performance of the proposed BOTRA algorithm compared with benchmark algorithms.