Demand Learning and Cooperative Deployment of UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a powerful tool has found its applicability in assisting mobile users to deal with computation-intensive and delay-sensitive applications (e.g., edge computing, high-speed Internet access, and local caching). However, deployment of UAV-aided mobile services (UMS) faces challenges due to the UAV limitation in wireless coverage and energy storage. Aware of such physical limitations, a future UMS system should be intelligent enough to self-plan trajectories and best offer computational capabilities to mobile users. There are important issues regarding the UAV-user interaction, UAV-UAV cooperation for sustainable service provision, and dynamic UMS pricing. These networking and resource management issues are largely overlooked in the literature and this article presents intelligent solutions for cooperative UMS deployment and operation. Mobile users’ locations are generally private information and changing over time. How to learn on-demand users’ truthful location reporting is important for determining optimal UAV deployment in serving all the users fairly. After addressing the truthful UAV-user interaction issue via game theory, we further study the UAV network sustainability for UMS provision by minimizing the energy consumption cost during deployment and seeking UAV-UAV cooperation. Finally, for profit-maximizing purpose, we analyze the cooperative UAVs’ deployment, capacity allocation, and dynamic service pricing.