VFC-Based Cooperative UAV Computation Task Offloading for Post-disaster Rescue

Abstract

Natural disasters often cause huge and unpredictable losses to human lives and properties. In such an emergency post-disaster rescue situation, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are effective tools to enter the damaged areas to perform immediate disaster recovery missions, due to their flexible mobilities and fast deployment. However, the UAVs typically have very limited batteries and computational capacities, which make them unable to perform heavy computation tasks during the complicated disaster recovery process. This paper addresses the issue with a fog computing based UAV system. In specific, we first introduce the vehicular fog computing (VFC) system in which the unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) perform the computation tasks offloaded from UAVs. To resolve the transmission competitions yet enable cooperations among UAVs and UGVs, a stable matching algorithm is developed to transform the computation task offloading problem into a two-sided matching problem. An iterative algorithm is then developed which matches each UAV with the most suitable UGV for offloading. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively improve utilities of UAVs and reduce average delay through comparison with conventional schemes.