Energy Efficient 3-D UAV Control for Persistent Communication Service and Fairness: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flying wireless communication platform have attracted much attention. Benefiting from the mobility, UAV aerial base stations can be deployed quickly and flexibly, and can effectively establish Line-of-Sight communication links. However, there are many challenges in UAV communication system. The first challenge is energy constraint, where the UAV battery lifetime is in the order of fraction of an hour. The second challenge is that the coverage area of UAV aerial base station is limited and the commercial UAV is usually expensive. Thus, covering a large target region all the time with sufficient UAVs is quite challenging. To solve above challenges, in this paper, we propose energy efficient and fair 3-D UAV scheduling with energy replenishment, where UAVs move around to serve users and recharge timely to replenish energy. Inspired by the success of deep reinforcement learning, we propose a UAV Control policy based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (UC-DDPG) to address the combination problem of 3-D mobility of multiple UAVs and energy replenishment scheduling, which ensures energy efficient and fair coverage of each user in a large region and maintains the persistent service. Simulation results reveal that UC-DDPG shows a good convergence and outperforms other scheduling algorithms in terms of data volume, energy efficiency and fairness.