Altitude Optimization and Task Allocation of UAV-Assisted MEC Communication System

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in wireless communication systems due to their flexible mobility and high maneuverability. The combination of UAVs and mobile edge computing (MEC) is regarded as a promising technology to provide high-quality computing services for latency-sensitive applications. In this paper, a novel UAV-assisted MEC uplink maritime communication system is proposed, where an MEC server is equipped on UAV to provide flexible assistance to maritime user. In particular, the task of user can be divided into two parts: one portion is offloaded to UAV and the remaining portion is offloaded to onshore base station for computing. We formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total system latency by designing the optimal flying altitude of UAV and the optimal task allocation ratio. We derive a semi closed-form expression of the optimal flying altitude of UAV and a closed-form expression of the optimal task allocation ratio. Simulation results demonstrate the precision of the theoretical analyses and show some interesting insights.