Movable-Antenna Assisted Energy Minimization in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Systems

Abstract

Driven by the exponential growth of latency-sensitive applications, mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm, yet mitigating its substantial energy consumption remains critical. This paper explores a movable-antenna (MA) assisted energy minimization scheme in an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled MEC system, where a UAV equipped with an MA array serves as an edge server to process tasks offloaded from terrestrial consumer electronics (CE) devices. To minimize the total system energy consumption, we jointly optimize computation resource allocation, CE transmit power, receive beamforming, and MA positions. To tackle the resulting non-convex problem with coupled variables, a robust alternating optimization algorithm based on the block coordinate descent method is developed. The problem is iteratively decomposed into three subproblems. In particular, the subproblem of transmit power and receive beamforming is reformulated and optimized using the quadratic transform technique, while the MA array positions are optimized via the particle swarm optimization algorithm. Numerical simulations verify that the proposed scheme achieves substantial energy savings over conventional benchmarks.