UAV-Assisted Wireless Energy and Data Transfer With Deep Reinforcement Learning

As a typical scenario in future generation communication network applications, UAV-assisted communication can perform autonomous data delivery for massive machine type communication (mMTC), where the data generated from Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be carried and delivered to the corresponding locations with no direct communication channels to the IoT devices. Wireless energy transfer technique can recharge the UAV when the system is in operation, assisting the UAV to continuously collect and deliver data. In this work, we formulate a Markov decision process (MDP) model to describe the energy and data transfer optimization problem for the UAV. To maximize the long-term utility of the UAV, the MDP model is solved by value iteration algorithm to obtain the optimal strategies of the UAV to collect data, deliver data, and receive transferred energy to replenish on-device battery energy storage. Furthermore, to tackle the issues of system state uncertainties, partially observable states, and large state space in UAV-assisted communication systems, we extend the MDP model and solve it by using a Q -learning and a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) schemes. Simulations and numerical results validate that, compared with baseline schemes, the proposed MDP model with DRL based scheme can achieve better wireless energy and data transfer strategies in terms of the higher long-term utility of the UAV.