Ellipsoidal Trajectory Optimization for Minimizing Latency and Data Transmission Energy in UAV-Assisted MEC Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Due to their flexible deployment and movement capability, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being utilized as flying mobile edge computing (MEC) platforms, offering real-time computational resources and low-latency data processing for a wide range of applications. This article aims to explore a UAV-assisted MEC system where multiple UAVs provide MEC services to mobile devices (MDs) using an ellipsoidal trajectory. Depending on the position, size, and orientation of the ellipsoidal trajectories, the coverage area of the UAV, the energy consumption, and the task transmission latency of MDs change. This has rarely been investigated in the existing works. Furthermore, unlike other studies, we consider that each MD has varying task offloading rates, which, together with varying user densities, makes the problem more challenging. Therefore, we formulate an optimization problem that finds the center position, major radius, minor radius, and rotation angle of the ellipsoidal trajectory of UAV-assisted MEC servers, to minimize the total transmission latency and energy consumption of mobile devices while taking into account the required data transmission rate, task transmission time, and energy consumption constraints. Then, we transform this optimization problem into a Markov decision process and propose a deep Q-learning-based ellipsoidal trajectory optimization (DETO) algorithm, to resolve it. The results from our simulations demonstrate that DETO efficiently computes the optimal position and trajectory for each UAV, and can achieve better performance compared to other baselines, leading to the reduced data transmission latency and energy consumption of mobile devices across a range of simulation scenarios.