Guest Editorial: Aerial Computing: Drones for Multi-Access Edge Computing

Abstract

The employment of multi-access edge computing (MEC) promotes the emergence of novel computation-intensive and time-sensitive applications at the network edge. Resource-limited devices can offload their computing tasks to edge servers, thereby avoiding heavy computing loads and reducing energy consumption. However, the computing servers are usually embedded in the fixed access points (APs) or base stations (BSs) in traditional MEC, which make it difficult to meet the unexpected explosively increasing computing demands and server users in certain emergency scenarios. Due to mobility, flexibility, and maneuverability, aerial computing has drawn extensive attention, where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with computing servers provide agile computing services to mobile devices. Despite the potential of the aerial computing, however, many challenges also need to be addressed in this new paradigm. Until now, limited research progress has been made toward aerial computing.