RIS-Assisted Jamming Rejection and Path Planning for UAV-Borne IoT Platform: A New Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep reinforcement learning framework utilizing RIS to enable UAVs to effectively plan paths and reject jamming in IoT environments, improving resilience without channel knowledge.

Contribution

It presents a novel DRL-based method for UAV trajectory and RIS configuration that does not require channel information, enhancing jamming resistance in IoT applications.

Findings

TD3 converges faster and smoother than DDPG.

The approach effectively suppresses jamming signals.

The method improves UAV resilience without channel knowledge.

Abstract

This paper presents a new deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach to the trajectory planning and jamming rejection of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Jamming can prevent timely delivery of sensing data and reception of operation instructions. With the assistance of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), we propose to augment the radio environment, suppress jamming signals, and enhance the desired signals. The UAV is designed to learn its trajectory and the RIS configuration based solely on changes in its received data rate, using the latest deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and twin delayed DDPG (TD3) models. Simulations show that the proposed DRL algorithms give the UAV with strong resistance against jamming and that the TD3 algorithm exhibits faster and smoother convergence than the DDPG algorithm, and suits better for larger RISs. This DRL-based approach eliminates the need for knowledge of the channels involving the RIS and jammer, thereby offering significant practical value.