Task Scheduling With UAV-Assisted Dispersed Computing for Disaster Scenario

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are beginning to make a splash in emergency disaster scenarios owing to its excellent air mobility and flexibility. Considering that large base stations often cannot be deployed to disaster areas in the first place and the variation of communication links between UAVs, we formulate the task scheduling problem for disaster scenarios as a two-stage Lyapunov optimization problem and propose a dispersed computing network consisting of UAVs and ground mobile devices, which is used for collaborative computing. We decouple the long-term stability of the task queues of the nodes in the system in terms of time slots as a deterministic optimization problem by Lyapunov techniques. By jointly optimizing the task size transmitted from the control center to the UAVs, the task size computed locally and offloaded by the UAVs and mobile devices, the energy consumption of the dispersed computation system is minimized while ensuring the stability of the computation queues. The simulation results verify that our proposed algorithm is close to the optimal case in terms of queue stability, and our algorithm is able to reduce the system energy consumption by more than 50% compared to the local computation of UAVs.