Energy-Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation in UAV Assisted Mobile Edge Computing Over Social Internet of Vehicles

Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) is a new paradigm that enables social relationships among vehicles by integrating vehicle-to-everything communications and social networking properties into the vehicular environment. Through the provision of diverse socially-inspired applications and services, the emergence of SIoV helps to improve the road experience, traffic efficiency, road safety, travel comfort, and entertainment along the roads. However, the computation performance for those applications have been seriously affected by resource-limited on-board units as well as deployment costs and workloads of roadside units. Under such context, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing environment over SIoV with a three-layer integrated architecture is adopted in this paper. Within this architecture, we explore the energy-aware dynamic resource allocation problem by taking into account partial computation offloading, social content caching, and radio resource scheduling. Particularly, we develop an optimization framework for total utility maximization by jointly optimizing the transmit power of vehicle and the UAV trajectory. To resolve this problem, an energy-aware dynamic power optimization problem is formulated under the constraint of the evolution law of energy consumption state for each vehicle. By considering two cases, i.e., cooperation and noncooperation among vehicles, we obtain the optimal dynamic power allocation of the vehicle with a fixed UAV trajectory via dynamic programming method. In addition, under the condition of fixed power, a search algorithm is introduced to derive the optimized UAV trajectory based on acceptable ground-UAV distance metric and the optimal offloaded data size of the vehicle. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework over alternative benchmark schemes.