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

• 作者: Chengxiao Liu Wei Feng Xiaoming Tao Ning Ge
• 来源期刊: 工程（英文）
• 年，卷（期）: 2022,（1）
• 所属期刊栏目: 6G Requirements, Vision, and Enabling Technologies-Article
• 页码范围: 96-107
• 页数: 12页
• 语种: 英文

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,includ-ing 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 oasis-oriented 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 advan-tageous to integrate NTN with MEC for wide-area time-sensitive IoT.