Placement Optimization of Aerial Base Stations with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized as aerial base stations (ABSs) to assist terrestrial infrastructure for keeping wireless connectivity in various emergency scenarios. To maximize the coverage rate of N ground users (GUs) by jointly placing multiple ABSs with limited coverage range is known to be a NP-hard problem with exponential complexity in N. The problem is further complicated when the coverage range becomes irregular due to site-specific blockage (e.g., buildings) on the air-ground channel in the 3-dimensional (3D) space. To tackle this challenging problem, this paper applies the Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) method by 1) representing the state by a coverage bitmap to capture the spatial correlation of GUs/ABSs, whose dimension and associated neural network complexity is invariant with arbitrarily large N; and 2) designing the action and reward for the DRL agent to effectively learn from the dynamic interactions with the complicated propagation environment represented by a 3D Terrain Map. Specifically, a novel two-level design approach is proposed, consisting of a preliminary design based on the dominant line-of-sight (LoS) channel model, and an advanced design to further refine the ABS positions based on site-specific LoS/non-LoS channel states. The double deep Q-network (DQN) with Prioritized Experience Replay (Prioritized Replay DDQN) algorithm is applied to train the policy of multi-ABS placement decision. Numerical results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the coverage rate in complex environment, compared to the benchmark DQN and K-means algorithms.