Fuhui Zhou

Ziye Jia, Yao Wu, Qihui Wu et al.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms are increasingly explored for their potentials in various applications such as surveillance, disaster response, and military. However, UAV swarms face significant challenges of implementing effective and rapid decisions under dynamic and uncertain environments. The traditional decision-making frameworks, mainly relying on centralized control and rigid architectures, are limited by their adaptability and scalability especially in complex environments. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (H-OODA) loop based framework for the UAV swarm operation in uncertain environments, which is implemented by embedding the classical OODA loop across the cloud-edge-terminal layers, and leveraging the network function virtualization (NFV) technology to provide flexible and scalable decision-making functions. In addition, based on the proposed H-OODA framework, we joint autonomous decision-making and cooperative control to enhance the adaptability and efficiency of UAV swarms. Furthermore, we present some typical case studies to verify the improvement and efficiency of the proposed framework. Finally, the potential challenges and possible directions are analyzed to provide insights for the future H-OODA enabled UAV swarms.

Ziye Jia, Sijie He, Ligang Yuan et al.

Due to the scalability and portability, low-altitude intelligent networks (LAINs) are essential in various fields such as surveillance and disaster rescue. However, in LAINs, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are characterized by the distributed topology and high mobility, thus vulnerable to security threats, which may degrade routing performances for data transmissions. Hence, how to ensure the routing stability and security of LAINs is challenging. In this paper, we focus on the routing with multiple UAV clusters in LAINs. To minimize the damage caused by potential threats, we present the zero-trust architecture with the software-defined perimeter and blockchain techniques to manage the identify and mobility of UAVs. Besides, we formulate the routing problem to optimize the end-to-end (E2E) delay and transmission success ratio (TSR) simultaneously, which is an integer nonlinear programming problem and intractable to solve. Therefore, we reformulate the problem into a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process. We design the multi-agent double deep Q-network-based routing algorithms to solve the problem, empowered by the soft-hierarchical experience replay buffer and prioritized experience replay mechanisms. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted and the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework reduces the average E2E delay by 59\% and improves the TSR by 29\% on average compared to benchmarks, while simultaneously enabling faster and more robust identification of low-trust UAVs.