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In this study, we design and analyze a reliability-oriented downlink wireless network assisted by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This network employs non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission and finite blocklength (FBL) codes. In the network, ground user equipments (GUEs) request content from a remote base station (BS), and there are no direct connections between the BS and the GUEs. To address this, we employ a UAV with a limited caching capacity to assist the BS in completing the communication. The UAV can either request uncached content from the BS and then serve the GUEs or directly transmit cached content to the GUEs. In this paper, we first introduce the decoding error rate within the FBL regime and explore caching policies for the UAV. Subsequently, we formulate an optimization problem aimed at minimizing the average maximum end-to-end decoding error rate across all GUEs while considering the coding length and maximum UAV transmission power constraints. We propose a two-step alternating optimization scheme embedded within a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm to jointly determine the UAV trajectory and transmission power allocations, as well as blocklength of downloading phase, and our numerical results show that the combined learning-optimization algorithm efficiently addresses the considered problem. In particular, it is shown that a well-designed UAV trajectory, relaxing the FBL constraint, increasing the cache size, and providing a higher UAV transmission power budget all lead to improved performance.
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Optimal Trajectories of a UAV Base Station Using Lagrangian Mechanics
This paper considers the problem of optimizing the trajectory of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Base Station (BS). A map is considered, characterized by a traffic intensity of users to be served. The UAV BS must travel from a given initial location at an initial time to a final position within a given duration and serves the traffic on its way. The problem consists in finding the optimal trajectory that minimizes a certain cost depending on the velocity and on the amount of served traffic. The problem is formulated using the framework of Lagrangian mechanics. When the traffic intensity is quadratic (single-phase), we derive closed-form formulas for the optimal trajectory. When the traffic intensity is bi-phase, necessary conditions of optimality are provided and an Alternating Optimization Algorithm is proposed, that returns a trajectory satisfying these conditions. The Algorithm is initialized with a Model Predictive Control (MPC) online algorithm. Numerical results show how the trajectory is improved with respect to the MPC solution.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1820821
- PAR ID:
- 10112120
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845287
