LEO-Assisted Aerial Deployment in Post-Disaster Scenarios Using a Combinatorial Bandit and Genetic Algorithmic Approach

Abstract

This paper proposes integrating low earth orbit satellites (LEO-Sats) and multiple aerials to provide rescue services in post-disaster areas. Aerials are distributed to provide wireless connectivity to survivors and rescue workers, while LEO-Sat exhibits backhaul linkages to aerials to connect them with the closest surviving ground base station (GBS). In this context, the aerials’ deployment should maximize the total system rate while guaranteeing fairness among the served post-disaster regions within aerials’ limited battery budget and LEO-Sat’s limited bandwidth resources. Therefore, a combinatorial bandit model with arms fairness and budget constraints (CB-FBC) is proposed to address the aerials’ deployment while maintaining fairness in covering post-disaster regions within the aerials’ limited battery resources. Additionally, the aerials’ transmit communication powers and LEO-Sat’s bandwidth resources are optimized according to traffic requests of LEO-aerial linkages using a genetic algorithm (GA). By means of numerical analysis, the proposed GA shows superior performance over other naïve benchmarks.