A Group-Selling Auction for Deadline-Constrained Computation Collaborative Offloading in Multi-Uav Edge Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) can provide delay-sensitive computation services in areas with limited terrestrial infrastructure. In an open service market, however, UAVs are usually owned by self-interested sellers, and a single UAV may not satisfy the deadline, reliability, and energy requirements of a task. This paper studies a multi-task group-selling auction for collaborative offloading in multi-UAV edge networks. Multiple task requesters (TRs) submit heterogeneous task contracts, while ground-side brokers recruit UAV sellers and package them into task-specific offloading services. We formulate the broker-side procurement and allocation problem under residual-energy, deadline, reliability, and budget constraints. To support short trading epochs, we design a three-stage multi-task group-selling auction (MT-GSA), where brokers construct feasible UAV coalitions, compute critical-ask payments for selected UAVs, and compete for TR contracts through a budget-feasible reverse auction. The mechanism preserves service feasibility, provides individual rationality for selected UAVs and winning brokers, and satisfies task-level ask-monotonicity under fixed pre-task residual states and verifiable service parameters. Cross-task state coupling limits this result to task-level threshold payments and does not ensure global strategy-proofness. Simulations show that MT-GSA improves task completion ratio, requester utility, broker utility, and UAV-side participation incentives over representative baselines.