Abstract
Supported by the advances in rocket technology, companies like SpaceX and Amazon competitively have entered the satellite Internet business. These companies said that they could provide Internet service sufficiently to users using their communication resources. However, the Internet service might not be provided in densely populated areas, as the satellites coverage is broad but its resource capacity is limited. To offload the traffic of the densely populated area, we present an adaptable aerial access network (AAN), composed of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and federated reinforcement learning (FRL)-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Using the proposed system, UAVs could operate with relatively low computation resources than centralized coverage management systems. Furthermore, by utilizing FRL, the system could continuously learn from various environments and perform better with the longer operation times. Based on our proposed design, we implemented FRL, constructed the UAV-aided AAN simulator, and evaluated the proposed system. Base on the evaluation result, we validated that the FRL enabled UAV-aided AAN could operate efficiently in densely populated areas where the satellites cannot provide sufficient Internet services, which improves network performances. In the evaluations, our proposed AAN system provided about 3.25 times more communication resources and had 5.1% lower latency than the satellite-only AAN.
Highlights
While cellular networks have been evolved continuously to 6th generation (6G), the terrestrial network was the major component of the cellular network
We proposed a novel aerial access network (AAN) system design with the federated reinforcement learning (FRL)-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, we presented FRL-enabled UAVs which find areas with high traffic demand based on traffic map, and we validated that the UAV-aided AAN provides more network resources and has less latency than the satellite-only AAN
We proposed AAN with LEO satellites and high-altitude UAVs equipped with FRL techniques
Summary
While cellular networks have been evolved continuously to 6th generation (6G), the terrestrial network was the major component of the cellular network. To broaden the network service area globally, some companies tried to utilize satellite communication networks to provide public network services (e.g., Starlink [1], OneWeb [2], and Kuiper [3]). The main role of highaltitude UAVs in our proposed system is to provide Internet service in areas where traffic demand is high. A huge amount of computation is required for the method of calculating the optimal location points with considering the amount of traffic changing in real time and the movement of satellites This method does not guarantee real-time performance and cannot deal with unexpected factors or situations. Our proposed system allows UAVs to be able to consider required traffic on the ground, move to the proper locations, and provide network services autonomously.
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