UAV Swarms for Joint Data Ferrying and Dynamic Cell Coverage via Optimal Transport Descent and Quadratic Assignment

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach combining optimal transport and quadratic assignment to optimize UAV swarms for joint data ferrying and dynamic cellular coverage, enhancing crisis communication capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a new optimization framework integrating DTN and cellular coverage on UAVs, using optimal transport and quadratic assignment for efficient deployment.

Findings

Achieves optimal cell coverage with quality-of-service constraints.

Enables large-scale UAV deployment for crisis communication.

Demonstrates effectiveness across various mobility scenarios.

Abstract

Both data ferrying with disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) and mobile cellular base stations constitute important techniques for UAV-aided communication in situations of crises where standard communication infrastructure is unavailable. For optimal use of a limited number of UAVs, we propose providing both DTN and a cellular base station on each UAV. Here, DTN is used for large amounts of low-priority data, while capacity-constrained cell coverage remains reserved for emergency calls or command and control. We optimize cell coverage via a novel optimal transport-based formulation using alternating minimization, while for data ferrying we periodically deliver data between dynamic clusters by solving quadratic assignment problems. In our evaluation, we consider different scenarios with varying mobility models and a wide range of flight patterns. Overall, we tractably achieve optimal cell coverage under quality-of-service costs with DTN-based data ferrying, enabling large-scale deployment of UAV swarms for crisis communication.