Workload-Aware Scheduling Using Markov Decision Process for Infrastructure-Assisted Learning-Based Multi-UAV Surveillance Networks

Abstract

In modern networking research, infrastructure-assisted unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) are actively considered for real-time learning-based surveillance and aerial data-delivery under unexpected 3D free mobility and coordination. In this system model, it is essential to consider the power limitation in UAVs and autonomous object recognition (for abnormal behavior detection) deep learning performance in infrastructure/towers. To overcome the power limitation of UAVs, this paper proposes a novel aerial scheduling algorithm between multi-UAVs and multi-towers where the towers conduct wireless power transfer toward UAVs. In addition, to take care of the high-performance learning model training in towers, we also propose a data delivery scheme which makes UAVs deliver the training data to the towers fairly to prevent problems due to data imbalance (e.g., huge computation overhead caused by larger data delivery or overfitting from less data delivery). Therefore, this paper proposes a novel workload-aware scheduling algorithm between multi-towers and multi-UAVs for joint power-charging from towers to their associated UAVs and training data delivery from UAVs to their associated towers. To compute the workload-aware optimal scheduling decisions in each unit time, our solution approach for the given scheduling problem is designed based on Markov decision process (MDP) to deal with (i) time-varying low-complexity computation and (ii) pseudo-polynomial optimality. As shown in performance evaluation results, our proposed algorithm ensures (i) sufficient times for resource exchanges between towers and UAVs, (ii) the most even and uniform data collection during the processes compared to the other algorithms, and (iii) the performance of all towers convergence to optimal levels.

Keywords

• Unmanned aerial networks
• scheduling
• learning systems
• surveillance
• Markov decision process (MDP)