Joint communication and computation resource scheduling of a UAV-assisted mobile edge computing system for platooning vehicles

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are recently envisioned to provide a tremendous social impact, while they put forward a much higher requirement for both vehicular communication and computation capacities to process resource-intensive applications. In this paper, we study unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) for a platoon of wireless power transmission (WPT)-enabled vehicles. Our objective is to maximize the system-wide computation capacity under both communication and computation resource constraints. We incorporate the coupled effects of the platooning vehicles and the flying UAV, air-to-ground (A2G) and ground-to-air (G2A) communications, onboard computing and energy harvesting into a joint scheduling optimization model of communication and computation resources. To tackle the resulting optimization problem, we propose a successive convex programming method based on a second-order convex approximation, in which feasible search directions are obtained by solving a sequence of quadratic programming subproblems and used to generate feasible points that can approach a local optimum. We also theoretically prove the feasibility and convergence of the proposed method. Moreover, simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method and demonstrate its superior performance over other conventional schemes.