MEC-assisted Low Latency Communication for Autonomous Flight Control of 5G-Connected UAV

Proliferating applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) impose new service requirements, leading to several challenges. One of the crucial challenges in this vein is to facilitate the autonomous navigation of UAVs. Concretely, the UAV needs to individually process the visual data and subsequently plan its trajectories. Since the UAV has limited onboard storage constraints, its computational capabilities are often restricted and it may not be viable to process the data locally for trajectory planning. Alternatively, the UAV can send the visual inputs to the ground controller which, in turn, feeds back the command and control signals to the UAV for its safe navigation. However, this process may introduce some delays, which is not desirable for autonomous UAVs’ safe and reliable navigation. Thus, it is essential to devise techniques and approaches that can potentially offer low-latency solutions for planning the UAV’s flight. To this end, this paper analyzes a multi-access edge computing aided UAV and aims to minimize the latency of the task processing. More specifically, we propose an offloading strategy for a UAV by optimally designing the offloading parameter, local computational resources, and altitude of the UAV. The numerical and simulation results are presented to offer various design insights, and the benefits of the proposed strategy are also illustrated in contrast to the other baseline approaches.