Enhanced Dynamic Spectrum Access in UAV Wireless Networks for Post-Disaster Area Surveillance System: A Multi-Player Multi-Armed Bandit Approach.

Amr Amrallah,Ehab Mahmoud Mohamed,Kei Sakaguchi,Gia Khanh Tran

doi:10.3390/s21237855

Abstract

Modern wireless networks are notorious for being very dense, uncoordinated, and selfish, especially with greedy user needs. This leads to a critical scarcity problem in spectrum resources. The Dynamic Spectrum Access system (DSA) is considered a promising solution for this scarcity problem. With the aid of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), a post-disaster surveillance system is implemented using Cognitive Radio Network (CRN). UAVs are distributed in the disaster area to capture live images of the damaged area and send them to the disaster management center. CRN enables UAVs to utilize a portion of the spectrum of the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) gates operating in the same area. In this paper, a joint transmission power selection, data-rate maximization, and interference mitigation problem is addressed. Considering all these conflicting parameters, this problem is investigated as a budget-constrained multi-player multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. The whole process is done in a decentralized manner, where no information is exchanged between UAVs. To achieve this, two power-budget-aware PBA-MAB) algorithms, namely upper confidence bound (PBA-UCB (MAB) algorithm and Thompson sampling (PBA-TS) algorithm, were proposed to realize the selection of the transmission power value efficiently. The proposed PBA-MAB algorithms show outstanding performance over random power value selection in terms of achievable data rate.

Highlights

The fast development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which are commonly known as drones, has received much attention in various domains [1,2]
We distributed each Primary Users (PUs) and Secondary Users (SUs) transmitter randomly in a 5 km × 5 km area, while PUs and SUs receivers are deployed in a certain area from PUs and SUs transmitters to comply with the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint
We have investigated the radio resource allocation for a Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) through Dynamic Spectrum Access system (DSA) system to support a disaster surveillance system using UAVs wireless networks

Summary

Introduction

The fast development of UAVs, which are commonly known as drones, has received much attention in various domains [1,2]. Major disasters have occurred around the world such as the great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which hit Japan in 2011; Hurricane Sandy on the northeastern coast of the USA in 2012; the Nepal earthquake in 2015, the massive explosion in the port of Beirut, Lebanon, in 2020; and the global wildfires in North America and Europe in 2021 All these natural disasters caused terrible damage to infrastructure and loss of human lives. UAVs can fly over the post-disaster areas to collect live photos of the current situation and send this collected information to a disaster management center to be analyzed. This will enable rescue teams to get information promptly about the actual situation in the affected area, which will enhance their response time [3]

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Conclusion