Prioritized Recovery Strategy for Robust UAV Swarm Communication via Graph Reinforcement Learning

Network failures, whether due to random disruptions or malicious attacks, pose significant challenges for uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm networks. One critical concern is determining which failed UAVs to recover or replace under limited resource conditions to enhance the robustness of their communication networks. Current research primarily considers static structural characteristics of the network and struggles to uncover deep features that influence network robustness, and the efficiency cannot meet the real-time needs in UAV swarm scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce a Prioritized Recovery strategy for failed nodes based on graph reinforcement learning (PRGRL). This approach integrates a random SAmpling neighbor method with a multihead attention mechanism to create a novel graph convolutional kernel (SAGCK). This kernel is designed to extract global structural information and relative positional information of nodes within the graph. Additionally, we develop a deep policy network (DPN) that explores the intricate relationships between graph-level and node embedding features, enabling the assessment of nodes’ impact on overall robustness. PRGRL’s network parameters are automatically updated and optimized using scalable deep reinforcement learning. Importantly, PRGRL prioritizes the recovery of boundary nodes within connected components to enhance network robustness further. Our experiments, conducted on both simulated and real-world networks, demonstrate that PRGRL outperforms existing methods of robustness enhancement across various recovery ratios, attack strategies, and network sizes while delivering superior real-time performance.