AoI-Minimal Data Collection in Multi-UAV Assisted Pre-Clustered IoT Networks

Under the advancement of emerging communication technologies, the utilization of Internet of Things (IoT) is progressively expanding across diverse domains. The age of information (AoI) stands as a crucial measurement in evaluating the efficiency of IoT networks. For efficient and reliable data collection, Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) have been extensively applied in IoT networks. However, the escalating number of sensor nodes and random data sampling mode within IoT networks have made it challenging for UAV trajectory planning with the constraint of energy consumption. In response to this challenge, our solution entails an attention-based actor-critic algorithm for multi-UAV path planning in a pre-clustered IoT network, which takes into account both the average AoI of clusters and the energy consumption of each UAV. The simulation outcomes validate that our algorithm achieves a trade-off between the information freshness and energy consumption in the multi-UAV data gathering scenario.