Deep Learning Meets Swarm Intelligence for UAV-Assisted IoT Coverage in Massive MIMO

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel deep learning and swarm intelligence-based approach to optimize UAV-assisted massive MIMO systems for IoT coverage, significantly improving capacity and reducing delay and runtime.

Contribution

It proposes a joint hybrid beamforming, UAV positioning, and power allocation scheme using deep learning and swarm intelligence for the first time in this context.

Findings

Achieves higher capacity compared to baseline methods.

Reduces average delay in delay-constrained transmissions.

Decreases runtime by 99% with the DL-based approach.

Abstract

This study considers a UAV-assisted multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MU-mMIMO) systems, where a decode-and-forward (DF) relay in the form of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) facilitates the transmission of multiple data streams from a base station (BS) to multiple Internet-of-Things (IoT) users. A joint optimization problem of hybrid beamforming (HBF), UAV relay positioning, and power allocation (PA) to multiple IoT users to maximize the total achievable rate (AR) is investigated. The study adopts a geometry-based millimeter-wave (mmWave) channel model for both links and proposes three different swarm intelligence (SI)-based algorithmic solutions to optimize: 1) UAV location with equal PA; 2) PA with fixed UAV location; and 3) joint PA with UAV deployment. The radio frequency (RF) stages are designed to reduce the number of RF chains based on the slow time-varying angular information, while the baseband (BB) stages are designed using the reduced-dimension effective channel matrices. Then, a novel deep learning (DL)-based low-complexity joint hybrid beamforming, UAV location and power allocation optimization scheme (J-HBF-DLLPA) is proposed via fully-connected deep neural network (DNN), consisting of an offline training phase, and an online prediction of UAV location and optimal power values for maximizing the AR. The illustrative results show that the proposed algorithmic solutions can attain higher capacity and reduce average delay for delay-constrained transmissions in a UAV-assisted MU-mMIMO IoT systems. Additionally, the proposed J-HBF-DLLPA can closely approach the optimal capacity while significantly reducing the runtime by 99%, which makes the DL-based solution a promising implementation for real-time online applications in UAV-assisted MU-mMIMO IoT systems.