MEC Empowered Non Terrestrial Network for 6G Wide Area Time Sensitive Internet of Things
In the upcoming sixth generation (6G) era, the demand for constructing a wide area time sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) keeps increasing. As conventional cellular technologies are hard to be directly used for wide area timesensitive IoT, it is beneficial to use non terrestrial infrastructures including satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) where a non terrestrial network (NTN) can be built under the cell free architecture. Driven by the timesensitive requirements and uneven distribution of IoT devices, the NTN is required to be empowered by mobile edge computing (MEC) while providing oasis oriented on demand coverage for the devices. Nevertheless, communication and MEC systems are coupled with each other under the influence of complex propagation environment in the MECempowered NTN, which makes it hard to orchestrate the resources. In this paper, we propose a process oriented framework to design the communication and MEC systems in a time division manner. Under this framework, the largescale channel state information (CSI) is used to characterize the complex propagation environment with an affordable cost, where a non convex latency minimization problem is formulated. After that, the approximated problem is given and it can be decomposed into subproblems. These subproblems are further solved in an iterative way. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed process oriented scheme over other algorithms. These results also indicate that the payload deployments of UAVs should be appropriately predesigned to improve the efficiency of resource use. Furthermore, the results imply that it is advantageous to integrate NTN with MEC for wide area time sensitive IoT. Index Terms Cell free, mobile edge computing, non terrestrial networks, sixth generation, wide area time sensitive IoT.
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