Drone-Hosted Computation for Emergency Response

—Ad hoc computing needs at remote locations or locations with insufficient resources due to reasons such as natural disasters require flexible solutions that are readily deployed on demand. We consider one such scenario where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones can be used to provide necessary coverage in terms of computational support. Specifically, we consider an environment where ground-based computational demand is satisfied by aerial drones that share the computational load to provide seamless service. We study transfer and location policies where transfer policy determines whether a job is locally processed by the drone that receives the order and location policy determines where a job is processed if it is sent to another drone. Our results indicate that the mean queue length of jobs waiting to be processed at the drones decreases with sharing the job processing load among the drones in the modeled system. Our results also highlight the beneficial aspects of the two step transfer and location policies.