Average Age of Information in UAV-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing System

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) holds great potential in providing ubiquitous computing capabilities for billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. By leveraging the average age of information (AoI), this paper evaluates the temporal effectiveness of status updates in a UAV-assisted MEC system. Specifically, the UAV is deployed to sequentially collect status updates from multiple ground sensor nodes (SNs) while simultaneously functioning as an MEC server to process the received data based on a first-come-first-served (FCFS) service policy. To thoroughly capture the AoI characteristics, the uploading time from SNs to the UAV, the UAV’s flight time between nodes, and the queuing delay experienced by updates awaiting processing are considered. We obtain the explicit formula for the average AoI, providing analytical insights into system performance. Furthermore, extensive numerical simulations are conducted to validate our theoretical analysis and evaluate the impact of various system parameters on the average AoI, offering valuable guidelines for optimizing UAV-assisted MEC network design.