UAV-Assisted Privacy-Preserving Online Computation Offloading for Internet of Things

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) plays a more and more important role in Internet of Things (IoT) for remote sensing and device interconnecting. Due to the limitation of computing capacity and energy, the UAV cannot handle complex tasks. Recently, computation offloading provides a promising way for the UAV to handle complex tasks by deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based methods. However, existing DRL-based computation offloading methods merely protect usage pattern privacy and location privacy. In this paper, we consider a new privacy issue in UAV-assisted IoT, namely computation offloading preference leakage, which lacks through study. To cope with this issue, we propose a novel privacy-preserving online computation offloading method for UAV-assisted IoT. Our method integrates the differential privacy mechanism into deep reinforcement learning (DRL), which can protect UAV's offloading preference. We provide the formal analysis on security and utility loss of our method. Extensive real-world experiments are conducted. Results demonstrate that, compared with baseline methods, our method can learn cost-efficient computation offloading policy without preference leakage and a priori knowledge of the wireless channel model.