Autonomous On-Demand Deployment for UAV Assisted Wireless Networks

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted wireless network has been recognized as an effective technology to facilitate the formation of a super flexible low-altitude platform for relieving the strain on traditional ground cellular systems. However, the on-demand deployment of the UAV-assisted wireless networks (OWN) becomes an essential yet challenging issue, as the constraints of UAVs’ location, resource provisioning, and demand distribution should be jointly considered. In this work, we investigate the OWN problem by proposing an autonomous learning framework (ALF) consisting of three sequential stages: demand prediction, proactive deployment, and resource allocation fine-tuning, which can be capable of autonomous network planning without reliance on manual operations in an extremely dynamic environment. In the demand prediction stage, we first design a dual transformer network (DTN) to capture the temporal and spatial dependencies of wireless traffic. We further reduce the computational complexity of DTN from quadratic time complexity to log-linear time complexity. In the proactive deployment stage, we jointly optimize the UAVs’ location and resource provisioning by proposing a modified general benders decomposition algorithm with a Γ-optimal convergence, where a learning-based discerning module is designed to accelerate the algorithm. In the resource allocation fine-tuning stage, we propose a simulated annealing-based algorithm to minimize the transmission rate degradation of users to reduce the bias caused by traffic demand prediction. Extensive numerical results based on an open source dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in comparison with existing baselines.