Hierarchical Matching Algorithm for Relay Selection in MEC-Aided Ultra-Dense UAV Networks

With the rapid development of communication technology, unmanned aerial vehicle–mobile edge computing (UAV-MEC) networks have emerged with powerful capabilities. However, existing research studies have neglected the issues involving user grouping and relay selection structures under UAV cluster-assisted communication. Therefore, in this article, we present a comprehensive communication–computing resource allocation for UAV-MEC networks. In particular, ground users make stable user groups first, and then multiple UAVs act as relays in order to assist these user groups in simultaneously uploading their tasks to the terrestrial base station at the edge server. Moreover, in order to maximize the system’s overall throughput, a more flexible and hierarchical matching relay selection algorithm is proposed in terms of matching the ground user groups and corresponding UAVs. For vulnerable users, we also propose a weighted relay selection algorithm to maximize the system performance. Furthermore, simulation results show that the proposed relay selection algorithm achieves a significant gain in comparison with the other benchmarks, and the stability of the proposed algorithms could be verified.