MEC-Empowered Non-Terrestrial Network for 6G Wide-Area Time-Sensitive Internet of Things  

作　　者：Chengxiao Liu Wei Feng Xiaoming Tao Ning Ge 

机构地区：[1]Department of Electronic Engineering,Tsinghua University,Beijing 100084,China [2]Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology,Tsinghua University,Beijing 100084,China

出　　处：《Engineering》2022年第1期96-107,共12页工程（英文）

基　　金：the National Key R&D Program of China(2018YFA0701601 and 2020YFA0711301);the National Natural Science Foundation of China(61771286,61941104,and 61922049);the Tsinghua University-China Mobile Communications Group Co.,Ltd.Joint Institute.

摘　　要：In the upcoming sixth-generation(6G)era,the demand for constructing a wide-area time-sensitive Internet of Things(IoT)continues to increase.As conventional cellular technologies are difficult to directly use for wide-area time-sensitive IoT,it is beneficial to use non-terrestrial infrastructures,including satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs).Thus,we can build a non-terrestrial network(NTN)using a cell-free architecture.Driven by the time-sensitive requirements and uneven distribution of IoT devices,the NTN must be empowered using mobile edge computing(MEC)while providing oasisoriented on-demand coverage for devices.Nevertheless,communication and MEC systems are coupled with each other under the influence of a complex propagation environment in the MEC-empowered NTN,which makes it difficult to coordinate the resources.In this study,we propose a process-oriented framework to design communication and MEC systems in a time-division manner.In this framework,large-scale channel state information(CSI)is used to characterize the complex propagation environment at an affordable cost,where a nonconvex latency minimization problem is formulated.Subsequently,the approximated problem is provided,and it can be decomposed into sub-problems.These sub-problems are then solved iteratively.The simulation results demonstrated the superiority of the proposed process-oriented scheme over other algorithms,implied that the payload deployments of UAVs should be appropriately predesigned to improve the efficiency of using resources,and confirmed that it is advantageous to integrate NTN with MEC for wide-area time-sensitive IoT.

关 键 词：CELL-FREE Mobile edge computing Non-terrestrial networks Sixth-generation Wide-area time-sensitive IoT 

分 类 号：TP391.44[自动化与计算机技术—计算机应用技术] TN929.5[自动化与计算机技术—计算机科学与技术]