Resilient UAV Swarm Communications with Graph Convolutional Neural Network
This addresses the need for resilient communications in UAV swarms, which is critical for applications like surveillance or disaster response, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing GCN methods.
The paper tackles the problem of self-healing communication connectivity in UAV swarm networks under unpredictable external disruptions, proposing GCN-based algorithms that rebuild connectivity more quickly than existing methods, with simulation results showing enhanced performance and reduced time complexity.
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 to facilitate the on-line executions of the GCN. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms can rebuild the communication connectivity of the USNET more quickly than the existing algorithms under both one-off UEDs and general UEDs. The simulation results also show that the meta learning scheme can not only enhance the performance of the GCN but also reduce the time complexity of the on-line executions.