  In the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) era, the demand for constructing a
wide-area time-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) keeps increasing. As
conventional cellular technologies are hard to be directly used for wide-area
timesensitive IoT, it is beneficial to use non-terrestrial infrastructures
including satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where a
non-terrestrial network (NTN) can be built under the cell-free architecture.
Driven by the timesensitive requirements and uneven distribution of machines,
the NTN is required to be empowered by mobile edge computing (MEC) while
providing oasis-oriented on-demand coverage for machines. Nevertheless,
communication and MEC systems are coupled with each other under the influence
of complex propagation environment in the MECempowered NTN, which makes it hard
to orchestrate the resources. In this paper, we propose a process-oriented
framework to design the communication and MEC systems in a time-decoupled
manner. Under this framework, the large-scale channel state information (CSI)
is used to characterize the complex propagation environment with an affordable
cost, where a non-convex task completion latency minimization problem is
formulated. After that, the approximated dual problem is given and it can be
decomposed into subproblems. These subproblems are further solved in an
iterative way. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed
process-oriented scheme over other algorithms. These results also indicate that
the payload deployments of UAVs should be appropriately predesigned to improve
the efficiency of resource use. Furthermore, the results imply that it is
advantageous to integrate NTN with MEC for wide-area time-sensitive IoT.
