Federated-Learning-Based Energy-Efficient Load Balancing for UAV-Enabled MEC System in Vehicular Networks

Abstract

At present, with the intelligence that has been achieved in computer and communication technologies, vehicles can provide many convenient functions to users. However, it is difficult for a vehicle to deal with computationally intensive and latency-sensitive tasks occurring in the vehicle environment by itself. To this end, mobile edge computing (MEC) services have emerged. However, MEC servers (MECSs), which are fixed on the ground, cannot flexibly respond to temporal dynamics where tasks are temporarily increasing, such as commuting time. Therefore, research has examined the provision of edge services using additional unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with mobility. Since these UAVs have limited energy and computing power, it is more important to optimize energy efficiency through load balancing than it is for ground MEC servers (MECSs). Moreover, if only certain servers run out of energy, the service coverage of a MEC server (MECS) may be limited. Therefore, all UAV MEC servers (UAV MECSs) need to use energy evenly. Further, in a high-mobility vehicle environment, it is necessary to have effective task migration because the UAV MECS that provides services to the vehicle changes rapidly. Therefore, in this paper, a federated deep Q-network (DQN)-based task migration strategy that considers the load deviation and energy deviation among UAV MECSs is proposed. DQN is used to create a local model for migration optimization for each of the UAV MECSs, and federated learning creates a more effective global model based on the fact that it has common spatial features between adjacent regions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy, the performance is analyzed in terms of delay constraint satisfaction, load deviation, and energy deviation.