Relaying Signal When Monitoring Traffic: Double Use of Aerial Vehicles Towards Intelligent Low-Altitude Networking

TL;DR

This paper introduces an integrated UAV-based system that combines monitoring and relaying functions in low-altitude networks, improving efficiency and reducing communication outages through a unified, proactive approach.

Contribution

It proposes a novel double-use UAV strategy that unifies monitoring and relay functions, enhancing network resilience and efficiency in low-altitude environments.

Findings

Reduces communication outage probability by nearly 10%.

Maintains high resilience with an 86% achievable rate without multiple UAVs.

Outperforms traditional ground-based handoff schemes.

Abstract

In intelligent low-altitude networks, integrating monitoring tasks into communication unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can consume resources and increase handoff latency for communication links. To address this challenge, we propose a strategy that enables a "double use" of UAVs, unifying the monitoring and relay handoff functions into a single, efficient process. Our scheme, guided by an integrated sensing and communication framework, coordinates these multi-role UAVs through a proactive handoff network that fuses multi-view sensory data from aerial and ground vehicles. A lightweight vehicle inspection module and a two-stage training procedure are developed to ensure monitoring accuracy and collaborative efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of this integrated approach: it reduces communication outage probability by nearly 10% at a 200 Mbps requirement without compromising monitoring performance and maintains high resilience (86% achievable rate) even in the absence of multiple UAVs, outperforming traditional ground-based handoff schemes. Our code is available at the https://github.com/Jiahui-L/UAP.