Topology Construction for Max-Min Rate Optimization in Heterogeneous AAVs Networks

This article considers a topology construction problem involving a fixed-wing autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV), a set of quad-rotor AAVs and mobile ground users. The constructed topology must maximize the max-min flow rate of ground users over a given planning horizon. To this end, we outline a mixed integer linear program (MILP) that jointly optimizes the trajectory of the fixed-wing AAV, placement of quad-rotor AAVs, and routing of traffic from each source-destination ground user pair. Solving the MILP is challenging because it requires an exhaustive collection of topologies. To this end, this article outlines a solution called rollout to determine the network topology in each time slot of a given planning horizon iteratively. The main idea of rollout is to generate a sequence of future decisions using a heuristic, where a decision corresponds to the placement of quad-rotor AAVs. Further, each sequence of decisions has a cost-to-go value. Rollout then selects the sequence with the highest cost-to-go value. The results show that the max-min flow rate achieved by rollout is on average 81% that of MILP.