UAV-Centric Privacy-Preserving Computation Offloading in Multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing

Gao, Chao; Wei, Dawei; Li, Keying; Liu, Wenjin

doi:10.3390/drones9100701

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Open AccessArticle

UAV-Centric Privacy-Preserving Computation Offloading in Multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing

¹

School of Cyber Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China

²

Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security, Zhengzhou 450001, China

³

School of Telecommunications Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China

^*

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Drones 2025, 9(10), 701; https://doi.org/10.3390/drones9100701 (registering DOI)

Submission received: 26 August 2025 / Revised: 8 October 2025 / Accepted: 10 October 2025 / Published: 12 October 2025

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Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer high mobility, cost-effectiveness and flexible deployment, but their limited computing and battery resources constrain their development. Mobile edge computing (MEC) can alleviate these constraints by computation offloading. Although reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been applied to optimize offloading strategies, using raw UAV data poses a risk of privacy leakage. To address this issue, we design a privacy-preserving RL-based offloading approach that applies local differential privacy (LDP) to perturb decision trajectories. We theoretically derive the

O (\sqrt{M} / ϵ)

regret bound and achieve

(ϵ, δ)

-LDP for the perturbation mechanism. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach through experiments.

Keywords: multi-UAV; mobile edge computing; computation offloading; reinforcement learning; local differential privacy

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MDPI and ACS Style

Gao, C.; Wei, D.; Li, K.; Liu, W. UAV-Centric Privacy-Preserving Computation Offloading in Multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing. Drones 2025, 9, 701. https://doi.org/10.3390/drones9100701

AMA Style

Gao C, Wei D, Li K, Liu W. UAV-Centric Privacy-Preserving Computation Offloading in Multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing. Drones. 2025; 9(10):701. https://doi.org/10.3390/drones9100701

Chicago/Turabian Style

Gao, Chao, Dawei Wei, Keying Li, and Wenjin Liu. 2025. "UAV-Centric Privacy-Preserving Computation Offloading in Multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing" Drones 9, no. 10: 701. https://doi.org/10.3390/drones9100701

APA Style

Gao, C., Wei, D., Li, K., & Liu, W. (2025). UAV-Centric Privacy-Preserving Computation Offloading in Multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing. Drones, 9(10), 701. https://doi.org/10.3390/drones9100701

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UAV-Centric Privacy-Preserving Computation Offloading in Multi-UAV Mobile Edge Computing

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