UAV Enabled Sustainable IoT Network with OTPDRL

Abstract

Integrating large-scale sensors into the network has become a research hotspot for its promising flexibility in monitoring vitally critical wild areas. However, the existing Internet of Things (IoT) systems are limited due to the lack of a stable power supply, which seriously affects the system’s sustainability. The combination of sensors equipped with cordless power batteries and long-distance power transmission has ushered in a new era. Using the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to charge the battery ensures the flexibility and sustainability of the sensor in environmental detection. In this work, we aim to provide a solution for maintaining the sustainability of the sensors while optimizing UAV trajectory to minimize the overall energy consumption of UAV. Since deep reinforcement learning successfully solves the NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, deep reinforcement learning is introduced in this work to obtain a feasible solution. We formulate the trajectory planning of UAV as a Markov decision problem and employ a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model based on an attention mechanism to find the optimal policy efficiently, named the optimal trajectory planning algorithm based on DRL (OTPDRL). The experimental results suggest the OTPDRL obtains a good trade-off between performance gain and computational time.