Energy-Efficient UAV-Aided Target Tracking Systems Based on Edge Computing

Unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-aided target tracking has been applied in many important practical scenarios such as target vehicle tracking missions. However, the limited computation capability of UAVs can hardly support computation-intensive tasks, like the target tracking with real-time video processing. Inspired by the strong computation capabilities of edge computing servers nowadays, this article develops an energy-efficient UAV-aided target tracking system, where the video processing tasks can be offloaded from a UAV to the edge nodes (ENs) along its flight trajectory. To select appropriate offloading ENs for efficient task processing and energy saving, we formulate a cost minimization problem by jointly optimizing the task execution time and the offloading energy consumption. To devise a practical offloading strategy, we propose an energy-efficient UAV’s task distribution (EUTD) algorithm by jointly taking the different computation capabilities among ENs, time and energy requirements for different tasks, and fast-changing wireless channel conditions into account. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can achieve significantly higher energy efficiency and lower latency in UAV-aided target tracking as compared with existing methods.