Learning-based trajectory optimization for 5G mmWave uplink UAVs

A Connectivity-constrained based path planning for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed within the coverage area of a 5G NR Base Station (BS) that uses mmWave technology. We consider an uplink communication between UAV and BS under multipath channel conditions for this problem. The objective is to guide a UAV, starting from a random location and reaching its destination within the BS coverage area, by learning a trajectory alongside achieving better connectivity. We propose simultaneous learning-based path planning of UAV and beam tracking at the BS side under urban macro-cellular(UMa) pathloss conditions, to reduce its sweeping time with apriori computational overhead using the deep reinforcement learning method such as Deep Q-Network (DQN). Our results show that our proposed learning-based joint path planning and beam tracking method is on par with the learning-based shortest path planning, besides beam tracking comparable to heuristic exhaustive beam searching method.