This work describes the orchestration of a fleet of MIMO-capable rotary-wing UAVs for harvesting prioritized traffic from a random distribution of heterogeneous users (with MIMO capabilities). In a finite-horizon offline setting, the goal is to optimize the beam-forming design, the UAV positioning and trajectory solution, and the user association/scheduling policy, to maximize the cumulative fleet-wide reward obtained by satisfying the quality-of-service mandates imposed on each user uplink request, subject to an average per-UAV mobility power constraint. With a probabilistic air-to-ground channel model, a multi-user MIMO uplink communication model with prioritized traffic, and a novel 3D mobility model for rotary-wing UAVs (with horizontal and vertical accelerations), the proposed framework constitutes a cross-layer optimization construction upon decomposing the global fleet-wide reward maximization problem: first, employ K-means clustering to obtain user clusters; then, equipped with zero-forcing beam-forming design, solve for the optimal positioning of the UAVs via two-stage grid search; next, treating these optimal positions as the graph vertices of a fully-connected mesh, under an average UAV power consumption constraint incorporated via projected subgradient ascent for dual optimization, design the 3D UAV trajectories (i.e., graph edges) via a learning based competitive swarm optimization algorithm; consequently, solve for the user association/scheduling strategy via a graphical branch-and-bound method on the underlying multiple traveling salesman problem. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms static UAV deployments, adaptive Voronoi decomposition techniques, and state-of-the-art iterative fleet control algorithms, vis-á-vis user quality-of-service and UAV average power consumption.

A novel LEarning-based Spectrum Sensing and Access (LESSA) framework is proposed, wherein a cognitive radio (CR) learns a time-frequency correlation model underlying spectrum occupancy of licensed users (LUs) in a radio ecosystem; concurrently, it devises an approximately optimal spectrum sensing and access policy under sensing constraints. A Baum-Welch algorithm is proposed to learn a parametric Markov transition model of LUs’ spectrum occupancy based on noisy spectrum measurements. Spectrum sensing and access are cast as a Partially-Observable Markov Decision Process, approximately optimized via randomized point-based value iteration. Fragmentation, Hamming-distance state filters and Monte-Carlo methods are proposed to alleviate the inherent computational complexity, and a weighted reward metric to regulate the trade-off between CR’s throughput and interference to the LUs. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that LESSA performs within 5% of a genie-aided upper bound with foreknowledge of LUs’ spectrum occupancy, and outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms across the entire trade-off region: 71% over correlation-based clustering, 26% over Neyman-Pearson-based spectrum sensing, 6% over the Viterbi algorithm, and 9% over adaptive Deep Q-Network. LESSA is then extended to a distributed Multi-Agent setting (MA-LESSA), by proposing novel neighbor discovery and channel access rank allocation. MA-LESSA improves CRs’ throughputs by 43% over cooperative TD-SARSA, 84% over cooperative greedy distributed learning, and 3× over non-cooperative learning via g-statistics and ACKs. Finally, MA-LESSA is implemented on the DARPA SC2 platform, manifesting superior performance over competitors in a real-world TDWR-UNII WLAN emulation; its implementation feasibility is further validated on an ad-hoc distributed wireless testbed of ESP32 radios, exhibiting 96% success probability.

This paper studies the adaptive trajectory design of a rotary-wing UAV serving as a relay between ground nodes dispersed in a circular cell and a central base station. Assuming the ground nodes generate uplink data transmissions randomly according to a Poisson process, we seek to minimize the expected average communication delay to service the data transmission requests, subject to an average power constraint on the mobility of the UAV. The problem is cast as a semi-Markov decision process, and it is shown that the policy exhibits a two-scale structure, which can be efficiently optimized: in the outer decision, upon starting a communication phase, and given its current radius, the UAV selects a target end radius position so as to optimally balance a trade-off between average long-term communication delay and power consumption; in the inner decision, the UAV selects its trajectory between the start radius and the selected end radius, so as to greedily minimize the delay and energy consumption to serve the current request. Numerical evaluations show that, during waiting phases, the UAV circles at some optimal radius at the most energy efficient speed, until a new request is received. Lastly, the expected average communication delay and power consumption of the optimal policy is compared to that of static and mobile heuristic schemes, demonstrating a reduction in latency by over 50% and 20%, respectively.