Communication-Enabled Deep Reinforcement Learning to Optimise Energy-Efficiency in UAV-Assisted Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed to provide wireless connectivity to static and mobile ground users in situations of increased network demand or points of failure in existing terrestrial cellular infrastructure. However, UAVs are energy-constrained and experience the challenge of interference from nearby UAV cells sharing the same frequency spectrum, thereby impacting the system's energy efficiency (EE). Recent approaches focus on optimising the system's EE by optimising the trajectory of UAVs serving only static ground users and neglecting mobile users. Several others neglect the impact of interference from nearby UAV cells, assuming an interference-free network environment. Despite growing research interest in decentralised control over centralised UAVs' control, direct collaboration among UAVs to improve coordination while optimising the systems' EE has not been adequately explored. To address this, we propose a direct collaborative communication-enabled multi-agent decentralised double deep Q-network (CMAD-DDQN) approach. The CMAD-DDQN is a collaborative algorithm that allows UAVs to explicitly share their telemetry via existing 3GPP guidelines by communicating with their nearest neighbours. This allows the agent-controlled UAVs to optimise their 3D flight trajectories by filling up knowledge gaps and converging to optimal policies. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing baselines in terms of maximising the systems' EE without degrading coverage performance in the network. The CMAD-DDQN approach outperforms the MAD-DDQN that neglects direct collaboration among UAVs, the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) and random policy approaches that consider a 2D UAV deployment design while neglecting interference from nearby UAV cells by about 15%, 65% and 85%, respectively.