UAV-Assisted Resilience in 6G and Beyond Network Energy Saving: A Multi-Agent DRL Approach
This addresses energy efficiency and resilience for UAV-assisted cellular networks, representing an incremental improvement through application of existing methods to a specific scenario.
This paper tackles the problem of maintaining network service coverage during energy-saving shutdowns or outages in 6G networks by using UAVs as temporary base stations, achieving a 24% reduction in total energy consumption compared to conventional configurations while maintaining comparable user service rates.
This paper investigates the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted resilience perspective in the 6G network energy saving (NES) scenario. More specifically, we consider multiple ground base stations (GBSs) and each GBS has three different sectors/cells in the terrestrial networks, and multiple cells are turned off due to NES or incidents, e.g., disasters, hardware failures, or outages. To address this, we propose a Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) framework to enable UAV-assisted communication by jointly optimizing UAV trajectories, transmission power, and user-UAV association under a sleeping ground base station (GBS) strategy. This framework aims to ensure the resilience of active users in the network and the long-term operability of UAVs. Specifically, it maximizes service coverage for users during power outages or NES zones, while minimizing the energy consumption of UAVs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MADDPG policy consistently achieves high coverage ratio across different testing episodes, outperforming other baselines. Moreover, the MADDPG framework attains the lowest total energy consumption, with a reduction of approximately 24\% compared to the conventional all GBS ON configuration, while maintaining a comparable user service rate. These results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in achieving a superior trade-off between energy efficiency and service performance, supporting the development of sustainable and resilient UAV-assisted cellular networks.