Towards the Future of Edge Computing in the Sky: Outlook and Future Directions

In modern 5G and Beyond (B5G) networks, the number of users and devices consuming highly-demanding services in terms of latency and throughput. Due to their high dynamicity and fine-grainess, such services must be supported by a joint management and integration effort between technologies such as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and novel radio and energy transfer techniques. The notion of Flying Edge Computing (FEC) arises as a prominent solution to provide a deeper level of integration and capabilities to UAV networks in collaboration with traditional edge computing and B5G infrastructure. FEC constitutes a highly elastic computation layer in modern networks, which can quickly adapt to surges in demand. This paper dives into FEC’s main opportunities and motivations in modern scenarios and presents some of the important design aspects of FEC. Experimental results show that the coupling of traditional MEC with FEC can deliver significantly better Quality of Service (QoS), improve service availability, and user satisfaction. Furthermore, FEC can adapt to user mobility patterns more efficiently, delivering contents and services.