Seamless Replacement of UAV-BSs Providing Connectivity to the IoT

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openAccess

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Volume Title

A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa

Date

2023-01-11

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Mcode

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Language

en

Pages

6

Series

GLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference, pp. 3641-3646

Abstract

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.

Description

| openaire: EC/H2020/857031/EU//5G!Drones

Keywords

Performance evaluation, Deep learning, Base stations, Q-learning, Handover, Autonomous aerial vehicles, Trajectory

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Citation

Hellaoui, H, Yang, B, Taleb, T & Manner, J 2023, Seamless Replacement of UAV-BSs Providing Connectivity to the IoT . in GLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference ., 10001699, IEEE, pp. 3641-3646, IEEE Global Communications Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 04/12/2022 . https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOBECOM48099.2022.10001699