Abstract
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been considered an ideal relay platform for enhancing the communication between ground agents, because they fly at high altitudes and are easy to deploy with strong adaptabilities. Their maneuvering allows them to adjust their location to optimize the performance of links, which brings out the relay UAV autonomous mobility control problem. This work addressed the problem in a novel scene with mobile agents and completely unknown wireless channel properties, using only online measured information of received signal strength (RSS) and agent positions. The problem is challenging because of the unknown and dynamic radio frequency (RF) environment cause by agents and UAV maneuvering. We present a framework for both end-to-end communication and multi-agent-inter communication applications, and focus on proposing: (1) least square estimation-based channel approximation with consideration of environment effects and, (2) gradient-based optimal relay position seeking. Simulation results show that considering the environmental effects on channel parameters is meaningful and beneficial in using UAV as relays for the communication of multiple ground agents, and validate that the proposed algorithms optimizes the network performance by controlling the heading of the UAV.
Highlights
Motivated by the aforementioned observations, this paper investigates using a unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as communication relay serving multiple ground agents communication
This work studies the mobility control problem of UAV as a communication relay in multi-agent on-demand missions, with considerations of mobile agents and completely unknown wireless channel properties, only using online measured information of received signal strength (RSS) and agent positions. To solve this difficult problem, we concentrate on a framework of model-based mobility control methods to drive the relay UAV to the optimal relay location is proposed, where an least square estimation (LSE)-based method is used to estimate channel parameters and gradient-based methods to generate optimal relay position for end-to-end and multi-agent-inter communication, respectively
Simulation results show that the proposed channel approximation algorithm and the mobility control algorithms are effective on driving the relay UAV to arrive at or follow the optimal relay position, so that the optimal network performance is guaranteed
Summary
In recent decades, using coordinated multiple agents to realize an objective has shown great superiority in various tasks, which are extremely varied and include missions such as civilian search and rescue [1], environment sensing and monitoring [2], surveillance and reconnaissance [3,4], wildland firefighting [5], and other scientific research. In such Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), mission efficiency is severely affected by the quality of information exchange. Increasing distance and obstructing due to terrain or surroundings (such as trees, building, etc.) negatively affects the quality of wireless communication severely because signal strength decreases exponentially [7,8].
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