Joint Channel and Link Selection in Formation-Keeping UAV Networks: A Two-Way Consensus Game

This paper is the first to investigate both communication and control in traffic channel (TCH) and control channel (CCH) respectively when considering leader-follower formation keeping in UAV communication networks. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between the mutual interference and information exchange cost, and then formulate the joint channel and link selection problem as a two-way consensus game between CCH and TCH. To characterize the two-way choice of link selection, we creatively propose the generalized two-way consensus equilibrium (GTCE) to capture the stable state. Then, we prove that the formulated game has at least one pure-strategy GTCE which can maximize the UAV communication network utility. A distributed better reply based joint channel and link selection (BRJCLS) algorithm as well as two-dimensional minimum spanning tree (MST) based initialization (TMSTI) algorithm is proposed to achieve the GTCE. Simulation results are presented to show the convergence and effectiveness of the formulated two-way consensus game and proposed algorithms.