Adaptive Resource Allocation for Emergency Communications with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Assisted Free Space Optical/Radio Frequency Relay System

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of coordinated resource allocation for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to address the scarcity of communication resources in disaster-affected areas. UAVs carrying modules of free space optical (FSO) and radio frequency (RF) serve as relay nodes and edge offloading nodes, presenting an FSO/RF dual-hop framework. Considering the varying urgency levels of tasks, we assign task priorities and transform the proposed problem into distributed collaborative optimization problem. Based on the K-means algorithm and the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) algorithm, we propose a UAV-coordinated K-means MADDPG (KMADDPG) to maximize the number of completed tasks while prioritizing high-priority tasks. Simulation results show that KMADDPG is 5% to 10% better than the benchmark DRL methods in convergence performance.

Keywords

• unmanned aerial vehicles
• emergency communication
• task priority
• free space optical/radio frequency
• multi-agent DDPG