Average AoI Minimization in UAV-Assisted Data Collection With RF Wireless Power Transfer: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Scheme

This article studies the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless powered network, where a UAV is dispatched to wirelessly charge multiple ground nodes (GNs) by using radio frequency (RF) energy transfer and then the GNs use their harvested energy to upload the sensed information to the UAV. At each moment, the UAV is scheduled to charge the GNs or only one GN is scheduled to upload its data. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the average Age of Information (AoI) of the GNs by jointly optimizing the trajectory of the UAV and the scheduling of information transmission and energy harvesting of GNs. As the problem is a combinational optimization problem with a set of binary variables, it is difficult to be solved. Thus, it is modeled as a Markov problem with large state spaces and a deep
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network (DQN)-based scheme is proposed to find its near-optimal solution on the basis of the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework. Two nets are structured with artificial neural network (ANN), where one is for evaluating the reward of the action performed in current state, and the other is for predicting realistic action. The corresponding state spaces, the efficient action spaces, and reward function are designed. Simulation results demonstrate the convergence of the proposed DQN scheme, which also show that the proposed DQN scheme gets much smaller average AoI than the three other known schemes. Moreover, by involving the energy punishment in the reward, the UAV may save its energy but yield higher AoI. Additionally, the effects of the packet size, the transmit power, and the distribution area of GNs on the GNs’ average AoI are also discussed, which are expected to provide some useful insights.