Trajectory Optimization Considering Charging Station Locations for UAV-based Edge Computing Environments

In this paper, we discuss a trajectory decision problem of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for UAV-based edge computing systems. In the UAV-based edge computing systems, some UAVs having computing resources fly over a given area to process data generated by clients such as IoT devices. In order to utilize the computing resources of UAVs, it is important for us to consider the trajectory of UAVs for approaching client nodes. Because UAVs have constraints about moving distance due to the power consumption, we need to consider the placement of charging stations in addition to the UAV trajectory. For this problem, this paper proposes an optimization method of the trajectory of multiple UAVs in a given area, which is a variant of the traveling salesman problem. The proposed method aims to minimize the maximum traveling distance of the UAVs. We divide the problem into some sub-problems such as clustering and trajectory decision to obtain approximate solutions of the optimization problem. Through numerical experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method.