Loay Ismail

Noor Khial, Naram Mhaisen, Loay Ismail et al.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with radar sensors are deployed for target search missions in diverse environments, where targets exhibit characteristic signatures (e.g., respiration micro-motion in human search) detectable through occlusions. A fundamental challenge arises from shifts in radar statistics as the UAV moves through a dynamic and potentially non-stationary environment, rendering any fixed signal-processing strategy suboptimal; yet perception and adaptation must run onboard a resource-constrained aerial node in real time. Since no single detector performs well across all conditions, we adopt a multi-policy paradigm and formulate UAV target search as an online policy selection problem over a library of specialized detectors, with performance measured by regret, the cumulative loss gap relative to the best policy in each scene. The setting couples in-scene stochastic noise with inter-scene shifts. Whereas prior methods capture only one regime, we account for both through the Stochastically Extended Adversary (SEA) framework, without requiring oracle knowledge of scene dynamics. Because adaptation must run at the UAV, we instantiate SEA through \textsc{SEArch}, a lightweight optimistic Follow the Regularized Leader (OFTRL) selector with an adaptive learning rate, achieving regret $O(\barσ_T \sqrt{T} + \sqrt{J})$, where $\barσ_T$ captures radar measurement noise and $J$ is the number of scene transitions over the mission horizon $T$. To enable rapid adaptation under frequent scene changes, we further introduce \textsc{W-SEArch}, a windowed variant that restarts every $w$ rounds and achieves regret $O(\barσ_I \sqrt{w})$ under at most one transition per window. Experiments show up to 30\% regret reduction compared to non-adaptive baselines across a range of non-stationary settings.

Zaineh Abughazzah, Emna Baccour, Loay Ismail et al.

The integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) enhances communication in disaster management and Search and Rescue (SAR) operations by ensuring connectivity when infrastructure fails. However, SAR scenarios demand stringent security and low-latency communication, as delays or breaches can compromise mission success. While UAVs serve as mobile relays, they introduce challenges in energy consumption and resource management, necessitating intelligent allocation strategies. Existing UAV-assisted O-RAN approaches often overlook the joint optimization of security, latency, and energy efficiency in dynamic environments. This paper proposes a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based framework for dynamic resource allocation in UAV relays, explicitly addressing these trade-offs. Our approach formulates an optimization problem that integrates security-aware resource allocation, latency minimization, and energy efficiency, which is solved using RL. Unlike heuristic or static methods, our framework adapts in real-time to network dynamics, ensuring robust communication. Simulations demonstrate superior performance compared to heuristic baselines, achieving enhanced security and energy efficiency while maintaining ultra-low latency in SAR scenarios.