Seamless Replacement of UAV-BSs Providing Connectivity to the IoT

This paper considers the scenario of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) acting as flying base stations (UAV-BSs) to provide network connectivity to ground Internet of Things (IoT) devices. More precisely, we investigate the issue where a UAV-BS needs to be replaced by a new one in a seamless way. First, we formulate the issue as an optimization problem aiming to maximize the minimum transmission rate of the served IoT devices during the UAV-BS replacement process. This is translated into jointly optimizing the trajectory of the source UAV-BS (the one to be replaced) and the target UAV-BS (the replacing one), while pushing the IoT devices to seamlessly transfer their connections to the target UAV-BS. We therefore consider a target replacement zone where the UAV-BS replacement can happen, along with IoT connections transfer. Furthermore, we propose a solution based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). More precisely, we introduce a Multi-Heterogeneous Agent-based approach (MHA-DRL), where two types of agents are considered, namely the UAV-BS agents and the IoT agents. Each agent implements a DQN (Deep Q-Learning) algorithm, where UAV-BS agents learn optimal policies to perform replacement while IoT agents learn optimal policies to transfer their connections to the target UAV-BS. The conducted performance evaluations show that the proposed approach can achieve near optimal optimization.

I. Introduction

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been identified as a key enabler of the next generation mobile networks, where UAVs equipped with the adequate radio technology, can act as flying base stations (UAV-BSs) to provide network connectivity to ground devices of the Internet of Things (IoT). This would also allow to support and re-establish network connectivity that has been disrupted due to a natural event of technical failure. UAV- BSs have attracted a lot of attentions from both scientific and industrial communities, which have been translated into different research contributions and implementations/Proof-of-Concepts.