Deep Reinforcement Learning for Trustworthy and Time-Varying Connection Scheduling in a Coupled UAV-Based Femtocaching Architecture

The paper is motivated by the urgent need, imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, for trustworthy access to secure communication systems with the highest achievable availability and minimum latency. In this regard, we focus on an ultra-dense wireless network consisting of Femto Access Points (FAPs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), known as caching nodes, where there are more than one possible caching node to handle user’s request. To efficiently cope with the dynamic topology of wireless networks and time-varying behavior of ground users, our focus is to develop an efficient connection scheduling framework, where ground users are autonomously trained to determine the optimal caching node, i.e., UAV or FAP. Our aim is to minimize users’ access delay by maintaining a trade-off between the energy consumption of UAVs and the occurrence of handovers. To achieve these objectives, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem and propose the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Q-Network-based Connection Scheduling (CQN-CS) framework. More specifically, to solve the constructed multi-objective connection scheduling problem, a deep Q-Network model is developed as an efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to train ground users to handle their requests in an optimal and trustworthy fashion within the coupled UAV-based femtocaching network. The effectiveness of the proposed CQN-CS framework is evaluated in terms of the cache-hit ratio, user’s access delay, energy consumption of UAVs, handover, lifetime of the network, and cumulative rewards. Based on the simulation results, the proposed CQN-CS framework illustrates significant performance improvements in companion to Q-learning and Deep Q-Network (DQN) schemes across all the aforementioned aspects.