An UAV-Enabled Intelligent Connected Transportation System With 6G Communications for Internet of Vehicles

6G networks provide faster communication for connected vehicles. These vehicles are connected to the Internet, forming the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Due to the development of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), more and more vehicles are deployed with data-intensive applications. These applications interact heavily with IoT devices at the edge of the network, which causes IoT devices to consume a lot of limited and valuable power. Task offloading can help overcome resource constraints of IoT devices by offloading task to edge server which has sufficient computational power in ITS. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is a promising solution by serving as Computing-Communications Edge Server (CCES) for resource-constrained IoT devices that there is no edge server nearby that can offload task. Due to the IoT devices’ limited battery capacity and UAV energy budget, it is a challenging issue to reduce the energy for task offloading in UAV-enable edge network. In this paper, an UAV-enabled Computing-Communications Intelligent Offloading (UAV-CCIO) scheme is proposed to offload task energy-efficiently. First, some nodes with a large amount of data are selected as Task Gathering Nodes (TGNs), and TGNs collect all the tasks of the left nodes. In this way, the UAV can only fly the TGNs and so all the IoT devices’ tasks can be offloaded. The distance needed for the UAV can be greatly reduced and energy is saved. On the other hand, tasks that route to TGNs have a relatively small amount of data, while nodes with a large amount of data have already been selected as TGNs without routing, thus saving energy. Second, an optimization strategy for collection tasks is proposed to reduce UAV’s energy. The extensive experimental simulations indicate that the performance of UAV-CCIO scheme is better than the existing scheme.