A Centralized Multi-Agent DRL-Based Trajectory Control Strategy for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Enabled Wireless Communications

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular as mobile base stations due to their flexible deployment and low-cost features, particularly for emergency communications, traffic offloading, and terrestrial communications infrastructure failures. This paper presents an autonomous trajectory control method for multiple UAVs equipped with base stations for UAV-enabled wireless communications. The objective of this work is to address the optimization challenge of maximizing both communication coverage and network throughput for ground users. The proposed multi-aerial base station trajectory control (MATC) scheme employs a two-stage learning approach. Initially, we developed a long short-term memory-based link quality estimation model to assess each user's link quality over time. The trajectory of the aerial base stations is then continuously adjusted through a centralized multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm to optimize communication performance. We evaluated our proposed system using real channel measurement data, i.e., amplitude and phase signal information. Notably, the proposed approach operates solely on received signals from users, without requiring knowledge of their specific locations. The proposed MATC strategy achieves 97.41% communication coverage while maintaining satisfactory system throughput performance. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly enhances both communication coverage and network throughput in comparison to the base line algorithms.