No Arabic abstract
Integrating unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) into the existing cellular networks that are delicately designed for terrestrial transmissions faces lots of challenges, in which one of the most striking concerns is how to adopt UAV into the cellular networks with less (or even without) adverse effects to ground users. In this paper, a cellular-connected UAV network is considered, in which multiple UAVs receive messages from terrestrial base stations (BSs) in the down-link, while BSs are serving ground users in their cells. Besides, the line-of-sight (LoS) wireless links are more likely to be established in ground-to-air (G2A) transmission scenarios. On one hand, UAVs may potentially get access to more BSs. On the other hand, more co-channel interferences could be involved. To enhance wireless transmission quality between UAVs and BSs while protecting the ground users from being interfered by the G2A communications, a joint time-frequency resource block (RB) and beamforming optimization problem is proposed and investigated in this paper. Specifically, with given flying trajectory, the ergodic outage duration (EOD) of UAV is minimized with the aid of RB resource allocation and beamforming design. Unfortunately, the proposed optimization problem is hard to be solved via standard optimization techniques, if not impossible. To crack this nut, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) solution is proposed, where deep double duelling Q network (D3QN) and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) are invoked to deal with RB allocation in discrete action domain and beamforming design in continuous action regime, respectively. The hybrid D3QN-DDPG solution is applied to solve the outer Markov decision process (MDP) and the inner MDP interactively so that it can achieve the sub-optimal result for the considered optimization problem.
In this paper, we investigate joint vehicle association and multi-dimensional resource management in a vehicular network assisted by multi-access edge computing (MEC) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). To efficiently manage the available spectrum, computing, and caching resources for the MEC-mounted base station and UAVs, a resource optimization problem is formulated and carried out at a central controller. Considering the overlong solving time of the formulated problem and the sensitive delay requirements of vehicular applications, we transform the optimization problem using reinforcement learning and then design a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based solution. Through training the DDPG-based resource management model offline, optimal vehicle association and resource allocation decisions can be obtained rapidly. Simulation results demonstrate that the DDPG-based resource management scheme can converge within 200 episodes and achieve higher delay/quality-of-service satisfaction ratios than the random scheme.
Cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are recently getting significant attention due to various practical use cases, e.g., surveillance, data gathering, purchase delivery, among other applications. Since UAVs are low power nodes, energy and spectral efficient communication is of paramount importance. To that end, multiple access (MA) schemes can play an important role in achieving high energy efficiency and spectral efficiency. In this work, we introduce rate-splitting MA (RSMA) and non-orthogonal MA (NOMA) schemes in a cellular-connected UAV network. In particular, we investigate the energy efficiency of the RSMA and NOMA schemes in a millimeter wave (mmWave) downlink transmission scenario. Furthermore, we optimize precoding vectors of both the schemes by explicitly taking into account the 3GPP antenna propagation patterns. The numerical results for this realistic transmission scheme indicate that RSMA is superior to NOMA in terms of overall energy efficiency.
In future drone applications fast moving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will need to be connected via a high throughput ultra reliable wireless link. MmWave communication is assumed to be a promising technology for UAV communication, as the narrow beams cause little interference to and from the ground. A challenge for such networks is the beamforming requirement, and the fact that frequent handovers are required as the cells are small. In the UAV communication research community, mobility and especially handovers are often neglected, however when considering beamforming, antenna array sizes start to matter and the effect of azimuth and elevation should be studied, especially their impact on handover rate and outage capacity. This paper aims to fill some of this knowledge gap and to shed some light on the existing problems. This work will analyse the performance of 3D beamforming and handovers for UAV networks through a case study of a realistic 5G deployment using mmWave. We will look at the performance of a UAV flying over a city utilizing a beamformed mmWave link.
Enabling cellular connectivity for drones introduces a wide set of challenges and opportunities. Communication of cellular-connected drones is influenced by 3-dimensional mobility and line-of-sight channel characteristics which results in higher number of handovers with increasing altitude. Our cell planning simulations in coexistence of aerial and terrestrial users indicate that the severe interference from drones to base stations is a major challenge for uplink communications of terrestrial users. Here, we first present the major challenges in co-existence of terrestrial and drone communications by considering real geographical network data for Stockholm. Then, we derive analytical models for the key performance indicators (KPIs), including communications delay and interference over cellular networks, and formulate the handover and radio resource management (H-RRM) optimization problem. Afterwards, we transform this problem into a machine learning problem, and propose a deep reinforcement learning solution to solve H-RRM problem. Finally, using simulation results, we present how the speed and altitude of drones, and the tolerable level of interference, shape the optimal H-RRM policy in the network. Especially, the heat-maps of handover decisions in different drones altitudes/speeds have been presented, which promote a revision of the legacy handover schemes and redefining the boundaries of cells in the sky.
In this paper, we consider a massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) downlink system that improves the hardware efficiency by dynamically selecting the antenna subarray and utilizing 1-bit phase shifters for hybrid beamforming. To maximize the spectral efficiency, we propose a novel deep unsupervised learning-based approach that avoids the computationally prohibitive process of acquiring training labels. The proposed design has its input as the channel matrix and consists of two convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To enable unsupervised training, the problem constraints are embedded in the neural networks: the first CNN adopts deep probabilistic sampling, while the second CNN features a quantization layer designed for 1-bit phase shifters. The two networks can be trained jointly without labels by sharing an unsupervised loss function. We next propose a phased training approach to promote the convergence of the proposed networks. Simulation results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach over conventional optimization-based algorithms in terms of both achieved rate and computational complexity.