CCTV-based surveillance using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is considered a key technology for security in smart city environments.This article creates a case where the UAVs with CCTV-cameras fly over the city area for flexible and reliable surveillance services. UAVs should be deployed to cover a large area while minimizing overlapping and shadow areas for a reliable surveillance system. However, the operation of UAVs is subject to high uncertainty, necessitating autonomous recovery systems. This article develops a multiagent deep reinforcement learning-based management scheme for reliable industry surveillance in smart city applications. The core idea this article employs is autonomously replenishing the UAV's deficient network requirements with communications. Via intensive simulations, our proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of surveillance coverage, user support capability, and computational costs.
26 February 2021 in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
This paper proposes a cloud-assisted joint charging scheduling and energy management framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. For charging the UAVs those are extremely power hungry, charging towers are considered for plug-and-play charging during run-time operations. The charging towers should be cost-effective, thus it is equipped with photovoltaic power generation and energy storage systems functionalities. Furthermore, the towers should be cooperative for more cost-effectiveness by intelligent energy sharing. Based on the needs and setting, this paper proposes 1) charging scheduling between UAVs and towers and 2) cooperative energy managements among towers. For charging scheduling, the UAVs and towers should be scheduled for maximizing charging energy amounts and the scheduled pairs should determine charging energy allocation amounts. Here, two decisions are correlated, i.e. , it is a non-convex problem. We re-formulate the non-convex to convex for guaranteeing optimal solutions. Lastly, the cooperative energy sharing among towers is designed and implemented with multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and then intelligent energy sharing can be realized. We can observe that the two methods are related and it should be managed, coordinated, and harmonized by a centralized orchestration manager under the consideration of fairness, energy-efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Our data-intensive performance evaluation verifies that our proposed framework achieves desired performance.
This article proposes a novel algorithm, named quantum multiagent actor–critic networks (QMACN) for autonomously constructing a robust mobile access system employing multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In the context of facilitating collaboration among multiple UAVs, the application of multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques is regarded as a promising approach. These methods enable UAVs to learn collectively, optimizing their actions within a shared environment, ultimately leading to more efficient cooperative behavior. Furthermore, the principles of quantum computing (QC) are employed in our study to enhance the training process and inference capabilities of the UAVs involved. By leveraging the unique computational advantages of QC, our approach aims to boost the overall effectiveness of the UAV system. However, employing a QC introduces scalability challenges due to the near intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) limitation associated with qubit usage. The proposed algorithm addresses this issue by implementing a quantum centralized critic, effectively mitigating the constraints imposed by NISQ limitations. Additionally, the advantages of the QMACN with performance improvements in terms of training speed and wireless service quality are verified via various data-intensive evaluations. Furthermore, this article validates that a noise injection scheme can be used for handling environmental uncertainties in order to realize robust mobile access.
5 June 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles
The development of urban-air-mobility (UAM) is rapidly progressing with spurs, and the demand for efficient transportation management systems is a rising need due to the multifaceted environmental uncertainties. Thus, this paper proposes a novel air transportation service management algorithm based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) to address the challenges of multi-UAM cooperation. Specifically, the proposed algorithm in this paper is based on communication network (CommNet) method utilizing centralized training and distributed execution (CTDE) in multiple UAMs for providing efficient air transportation services to passengers collaboratively. Furthermore, this paper adopts actual vertiport maps and UAM specifications for constructing realistic air transportation networks. By evaluating the performance of the proposed algorithm in data-intensive simulations, the results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing approaches in terms of air transportation service quality. Furthermore, there are no inferior UAMs by utilizing parameter sharing in CommNet and a centralized critic network in CTDE. Therefore, it can be confirmed that the research results in this paper can provide a promising solution for autonomous air transportation management systems in city-wide urban areas.
The 5G new radio standard defines various functions for forwarding treatments under differentiated quality of services requirements. In particular, a gNB base station helps combat overbuffering due to massive packet flows from associated mobile devices. Several active queue management (AQM) schemes have been proposed previously, with controlled delay (CoDel) proving to be an efficient method that can properly handle excessive buffering, that is called bufferbloat. This article proposes a novel and enhanced AQM scheme based on CoDel for gNB that guarantees low queuing delays, minimizes packet drop rate, and furthermore stabilizes the built-in queue. According to data-intensive performance evaluation results, the proposed scheme verifies that the queuing delay for served packets are decreased and supports ultrareliable low latency communication applications. Especially, the proposed algorithm achieves the packet drop rates and queuing delays tradeoff as $[\mathcal {O}(1/V), {O}(V)]$ where $V$ is a tradeoff parameter; providing efficient control decisions to improve performance in terms of time-average packet drop rate minimization subject to queue stability on demand in 5G mobile system.
Recent advances in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites have made it possible to achieve zero blind spots on Earth. Considering the give locations of these devices, this makes satellite-ground links between quantum devices a practical possibility. This paper proposes the first quantum federated learning (QFL) application in satellite-ground communication. To improve communication and computing performance, this paper adopts slimmable quantum federated learning (SQFL) and slimmable quantum neural networks (sQNN), which allow for two different configurations in quantum neural networks: the angle and pole configurations. This paper also employs superposition coding and successive decoding to increase communication opportunities. Through extensive experiments, the proposed satellite-ground SQFL framework performs well and is both computationally and communicationally efficient compared to classical federated learning and QFL.