Quantum-inspired gravitational search algorithm-based low-price binary task offloading for multi-users in unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted edge computing systems

Abstract Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-assisted edge computing (EC) brings computing resources closer to smart mobile devices (SMDs). Users of SMDs with limited resources can experience the flavor of computation and data-intensive applications. Users conserve energy by offloading resource-intensive tasks to edge servers (ESs) or UAVs. While offloading may introduce communication delays, leveraging ample wireless bandwidth can mitigate this issue by facilitating faster data transmission rates. However, mobile service providers (MSPs), facilitating offloading infrastructure, impose charges on users for bandwidth usage. Efficient utilization of limited computation units (CUs) is crucial. This paper introduces a binary task offloading (BTO) model for multi-user in multi-UAV-assisted EC systems using a quantum-inspired gravitational search algorithm (QGSA). Quantum encoding and decoding of the agents are provided. The decoding phase uses a novel hashing. The fitness function considers energy, delay, price, and resource utilization. Two penalties are incorporated with the fitness to discard the decoded agent that violates the constraints of the BTO model. The proposed QGSA ensures polynomial time execution. The proposed work is extensively simulated in multiple scenarios and compared with existing approaches. It is observed that the QGSA outperformed other algorithms in terms of delay, energy, resource utilization, and price. Analyses of convergence and statistics are performed.