Federated Learning in the Sky: Aerial-Ground Air Quality Sensing Framework with UAV Swarms
Heilongjiang University（黑龙江大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Georgia Southern University（佐治亚南方大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Alibaba-NTU Joint Research Institute（阿里巴巴-南洋理工大学联合研究院）；Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly（南洋理工大学-不列颠哥伦比亚大学积极乐龄卓越联合研究中心）
Yi Liu, Jiangtian Nie, Xuandi Li, Syed Hassan Ahmed, Wei Yang Bryan Lim, Chunyan Miao
Due to air quality significantly affects human health, it is becoming increasingly important to accurately and timely predict the Air Quality Index (AQI). To this end, this paper proposes a new federated learning-based aerial-ground air quality sensing framework for fine-grained 3D air quality monitoring and forecasting. Specifically, in the air, this framework leverages a light-weight Dense-MobileNet model to achieve energy-efficient end-to-end learning from haze features of haze images taken by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for predicting AQI scale distribution. Furthermore, the Federated Learning Framework not only allows various organizations or institutions to collaboratively learn a well-trained global model to monitor AQI without compromising privacy, but also expands the scope of UAV swarms monitoring. For ground sensing systems, we propose a Graph Convolutional neural network-based Long Short-Term Memory (GC-LSTM) model to achieve accurate, real-time and future AQI inference. The GC-LSTM model utilizes the topological structure of the ground monitoring station to capture the spatio-temporal correlation of historical observation data, which helps the aerial-ground sensing system to achieve accurate AQI inference. Through extensive case studies on a real-world dataset, numerical results show that the proposed framework can achieve accurate and energy-efficient AQI sensing without compromising the privacy of raw data.
Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Qualcomm Inc（高通公司）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
The usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civil and military applications continues to increase due to the numerous advantages that they provide over conventional approaches. Despite the abundance of such advantages, it is imperative to investigate the performance of UAV utilization while considering their design limitations. This paper investigates the deployment of UAV swarms when each UAV carries a machine learning classification task. To avoid data exchange with ground-based processing nodes, a federated learning approach is adopted between a UAV leader and the swarm members to impro…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；University of Colorado Colorado Springs（科罗拉多大学科罗拉多斯普林斯分校）；Ericsson Research（爱立信研究院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms must exploit machine learning (ML) in order to execute various tasks ranging from coordinated trajectory planning to cooperative target recognition. However, due to the lack of continuous connections between the UAV swarm and ground base stations (BSs), using centralized ML will be challenging, particularly when dealing with a large volume of data. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed to implement distributed federated learning (FL) algorithms within a UAV swarm that consists of a leading UAV and several following UAVs. Each following UAV trains a l…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；University at Buffalo (SUNY)（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Duke University（杜克大学）
We investigate training machine learning (ML) models across a set of geo-distributed, resource-constrained clusters of devices through unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) swarms. The presence of time-varying data heterogeneity and computational resource inadequacy among device clusters motivate four key parts of our methodology: (i) stratified UAV swarms of leader, worker, and coordinator UAVs, (ii) hierarchical nested personalized federated learning (HN-PFL), a distributed ML framework for personalized model training across the worker-leader-core network hierarchy, (iii) cooperative UAV resource p…
In this paper, we study the self-healing problem of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm network (USNET) that is required to quickly rebuild the communication connectivity under unpredictable external disruptions (UEDs). Firstly, to cope with the one-off UEDs, we propose a graph convolutional neural network (GCN) and find the recovery topology of the USNET in an on-line manner. Secondly, to cope with general UEDs, we develop a GCN based trajectory planning algorithm that can make UAVs rebuild the communication connectivity during the self-healing process. We also design a meta learning scheme t…
In radar accurate localization of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms, the high density, similar motion parameters, small radar cross-section (RCS), strong noise and far range put forward high requirements on radar resolution and transmitting power. In this paper, by using advantages of the long-time integration (LTI) technique and gridless sparse method, we construct a super-resolution framework for radar accurate localization of UAV swarms without changing radar hardware and system parameters. Thereafter, based on this framework, a range super-resolution method is proposed to realize the ra…
Unmanned aerial vehicles provide new opportunities for performance improvements in future wireless communications systems. For example, they can act as relays that extend the range of a communication link and improve the capacity. Unlike conventional relays that are deployed at fixed locations, UAVs can change their positions to optimize the capacity or range on demand. In this paper, we consider using a swarm of UAVs as amplify-and-forward MIMO relays to provide connectivity between an obstructed multi-antenna equipped source and destination. We start by optimizing UAV placement for the singl…
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Ericsson Inc.（爱立信公司）
Cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm is a promising solution for diverse applications, including cargo delivery and traffic control. However, it is still challenging to communicate with and control the UAV swarm with high reliability, low latency, and high energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose a two-phase command and control (C&C) transmission scheme in a cellular-connected UAV swarm network, where the ground base station (GBS) broadcasts the common C&C message in Phase I. In Phase II, the UAVs that have successfully decoded the C&C message will relay the message to th…
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) offers tremendous spectrum and energy efficiency in wireless networks by adjusting the amplitudes and/or phases of passive reflecting elements to optimize signal reflection. With the agility and mobility of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), RIS can be mounted on UAVs to enable three-dimensional signal reflection. Compared to the conventional terrestrial RIS (TRIS), the aerial RIS (ARIS) enjoys higher deployment flexibility, reliable air-to-ground links, and panoramic full-angle reflection. However, due to UAV's limited payload and battery capacity, it is…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Baicells Technologies Co., Ltd.（佰才邦技术有限公司）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
In this paper, we study the cluster head detection problem of a two-level unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm network (USNET) with multiple UAV clusters, where the inherent follow strategy (IFS) of low-level follower UAVs (FUAVs) with respect to high-level cluster head UAVs (HUAVs) is unknown. We first propose a graph attention self-supervised learning algorithm (GASSL) to detect the HUAVs of a single UAV cluster, where the GASSL can fit the IFS at the same time. Then, to detect the HUAVs in the USNET with multiple UAV clusters, we develop a multi-cluster graph attention self-supervised learni…
A swarm of cooperating UAVs communicating with a distant multiantenna ground station can leverage MIMO spatial multiplexing to scale the capacity. Due to the line-of-sight propagation between the swarm and the ground station, the MIMO channel is highly correlated, leading to limited multiplexing gains. In this paper, we optimize the UAV positions to attain the maximum MIMO capacity given by the single user bound. An infinite set of UAV placements that attains the capacity bound is first derived. Given an initial swarm placement, we formulate the problem of minimizing the distance traveled by t…
The conventional direction of arrival (DOA) estimation methods are performed with multiple receiving channels. In this paper, a changeling DOA estimation problem is addressed in a different scenario with only one full-functional receiving channel. A new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm system using multiple lifted reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is proposed for the DOA estimation. The UAV movement degrades the DOA estimation performance significantly, and the existing atomic norm minimization (ANM) methods cannot be used in the scenario with array perturbation. Specifically, consid…
In the existing cellular networks, it remains a challenging problem to communicate with and control an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm with both high reliability and low latency. Due to the UAV swarm's high working altitude and strong ground-to-air channels, it is generally exposed to multiple ground base stations (GBSs), while the GBSs that are serving ground users (occupied GBSs) can generate strong interference to the UAV swarm. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel two-phase transmission protocol by exploiting cellular plus device-to-device (D2D) communication for the UAV swarm. In …
Åbo Akademi University（奥布学术大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
With the growing popularity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for consumer applications, the number of accidents involving UAVs is also increasing rapidly. Therefore, motion safety of UAVs has become a prime concern for UAV operators. For a swarm of UAVs, a safe operation can not be guaranteed without preventing the UAVs from colliding with one another and with static and dynamically appearing, moving obstacles in the flying zone. In this paper, we present an online, collision-free path generation and navigation system for swarms of UAVs. The proposed system uses geographical locations of the…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm enabled edge computing is envisioned to be promising in the sixth generation wireless communication networks due to their wide application sensories and flexible deployment. However, most of the existing works focus on edge computing enabled by a single or a small scale UAVs, which are very different from UAV swarm-enabled edge computing. In order to facilitate the practical applications of UAV swarm-enabled edge computing, the state of the art research is presented in this article. The potential applications, architectures and implementation considerations …
Unlike aerial base station enabled by a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), aerial coordinated multiple points (CoMP) can be enabled by a UAV swarm. In this case, the management of multiple UAVs is important. This paper considers the power allocation strategy for a UAV swarm-enabled aerial network to enhance the physical layer security of the downlink transmission, where an eavesdropper moves following the trajectory of the swarm for better eavesdropping. Unlike existing works, we use only the large-scale channel state information (CSI) and maximize the secrecy throughput in a whole-trajecto…
Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) visible light communications (VLC) exposes many potentials over VLC and NOMA-VLC systems. In this circumstance, user grouping is of importance to reduce the NOMA decoding complexity when the number of users is large; however, this issue has not been considered in the existing study. In this paper, we aim to maximize the weighted sum-rate of all the users by jointly optimizing UAV placement, user grouping, and power allocation in downlink NOMA-VLC systems. We first consider an efficient user clustering strategy,…
This article proposes a cooperative friendly jamming framework for swarm unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying networks with wireless energy harvesting. Due to the limited energy of the UAVs, we develop a collaborative time-switching relaying protocol which allows the UAVs to collaborate to harvest wireless energy, relay information, and jam the eavesdropper. To evaluate the secrecy rate, we derive the secrecy outage probability (SOP) for two popular detection techniques at the eavesdropper, i.e., selection combining and maximum-ratio combining. Monte Carlo s…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be users that support new applications, or be communication access points that serve terrestrial and/or aerial users. In this paper, we focus on the connectivity problem of aerial users when they are exclusively served by aerial base stations (BS), i.e., UAVBSs. Specifically, the 3D placement problem of a directional antenna equipped UAV-BS, aiming to maximize the number of covered aerial users under a spectrum sharing policy with terrestrial networks, is investigated. Given a known spectrum sharing policy between the aerial and terrestrial networks, we prop…
This work details a scalable framework to orchestrate a swarm of rotary-wing UAVs serving as cellular relays to facilitate beyond line-of-sight connectivity and traffic offloading for ground users. First, a Multiscale Adaptive Energy-conscious Scheduling and TRajectory Optimization (MAESTRO) framework is developed for a single UAV. Aiming to minimize the time-averaged latency to serve user requests, subject to an average UAV power constraint, it is shown that the optimization problem can be cast as a semi-Markov decision process, and exhibits a multiscale structure: outer actions on radial wai…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications have attracted significant attention from both academia and industry. To facilitate the large-scale usage of UAVs for various applications in practice, we provide a comprehensive survey on the prototype and experiment for UAV communications. To this end, we first provide an overview on the general architecture of the prototype and experiment for UAV communications, and then present experimental verification for air-to-ground channel models and UAV energy consumption models. Next, we discuss measurement experiments on two promising paradigms of UAV c…
The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for collecting data from remotely located sensor systems is emerging. The data can be time-sensitive and require to be transmitted to a data processing center. However, planning the trajectory of a collaborative UAV swarm depends on multi-fold constraints, such as data collection requirements, UAV maneuvering capacity, and budget limitation. Since a UAV may fail or be compromised, it is important to provide necessary resilience to such contingencies, thus ensuring data security. It is important to provide the UAVs with efficient spatio-temporal trajec…
In this paper, we analyze the impact of a friendly unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) jammer on UAV communications in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. We first present channel components determined by the line-of-sight (LoS) probability between the friendly UAV jammer and the ground device, and introduce different channel fadings for LoS and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) links. We then derive the secrecy transmission probability satisfying both constraints of legitimate and wiretap channels. We also analyze the secrecy transmission probability in the presence of randomly distributed multiple frie…
We consider the uplink transmission between a multi-antenna ground station and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm. The UAVs are assumed as intelligent agents, which can explore their optimal three dimensional (3-D) deployment to maximize the channel capacity of the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system. Specifically, considering the limitations of each UAV in accessing the global information of the network, we focus on a decentralized control strategy by noting that each UAV in the swarm can only utilize the local information to achieve the optimal 3-D deployment. In this case, the …
This paper investigates a full-duplex orthogonal-frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) based multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-enabled wireless-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. In this paper, a swarm of UAVs is first deployed in three dimensions (3D) to simultaneously charge all devices, i.e., a downlink (DL) charging period, and then flies to new locations within this area to collect information from scheduled devices in several epochs via OFDMA due to potential limited number of channels available in Narrow Band IoT, i.e., an uplink (UL) communication period. To maximiz…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms are often required in off-grid scenarios, such as disaster-struck, war-torn or rural areas, where the UAVs have no access to the power grid and instead rely on renewable energy. Considering a main battery fed from two renewable sources, wind and solar, we scale such a system based on the financial budget, environmental characteristics, and seasonal variations. Interestingly, the source of energy is correlated with the energy expenditure of the UAVs, since strong winds cause UAV hovering to become increasingly energy-hungry. The aim is to maximize the cost e…
Aerial base stations (BSs) attached to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) constitute a new paradigm for next-generation cellular communications. However, the flight range and communication capacity of aerial BSs are usually limited due to the UAVs' size, weight, and power (SWAP) constraints. To address this challenge, in this paper, we consider dynamic cooperative transmission among multiple aerial BSs for power-efficient aerial communications. Thereby, a central controller intelligently selects the aerial BSs navigating in the air for cooperation. Consequently, the large virtual array of moving …
Flying by Inference: Active Inference World Models for Adaptive UAV Swarms
Department of Engineering and Naval Architecture (DITEN), University of Genoa（工程与 naval 架构系（DITEN），热那亚大学）；Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, Carlos III University of Madrid（智能系统实验室，系统工程与自动化系，马德里卡洛斯三世大学）
A smart grid is a widely distributed engineering system with overhead transmission lines. Physical damage to these power lines, from natural calamities or technical failures, will disrupt the functional integrity of the grid. To ensure the continuation of the grid's operational flow when those phenomena happen, the grid operator must immediately take steps to nullify the impacts and repair the problems, even if those occur in hardly-reachable remote areas. Emerging unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) show great potential to replace traditional human patrols for regularly monitoring critical situat…
