Air-Ground Collaborative Mobile Edge Computing:Architecture, Challenges, and Opportunities

By pushing computation, cache, and network control to the edge, mobile edge computing(MEC) is expected to play a leading role in fifth generation(5G) and future sixth generation(6G). Nevertheless, facing ubiquitous fast-growing computational demands, it is impossible for a single MEC paradigm to effectively support high-quality intelligent services at end user equipments(UEs). To address this issue,we propose an air-ground collaborative MEC(AGCMEC) architecture in this article. The proposed AGCMEC integrates all potentially available MEC servers within air and ground in the envisioned 6G, by a variety of collaborative ways to provide computation services at their best for UEs. Firstly, we introduce the AGC-MEC architecture and elaborate three typical use cases. Then, we discuss four main challenges in the AGC-MEC as well as their potential solutions. Next,we conduct a case study of collaborative service placement for AGC-MEC to validate the effectiveness of the proposed collaborative service placement strategy.Finally, we highlight several potential research directions of the AGC-MEC.