Cooperative UAV Trajectory Design for Disaster Area Emergency Communications: A Multiagent PPO Method

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This article investigates the issue of cooperative real-time trajectory design for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to support emergency communication in disaster areas. To restore communication links rapidly between mobile users (MUs) and the ground base stations, UAVs equipped with both radio frequency (RF) modules and free space optics (FSO) modules are utilized as relay nodes. Given the challenges of setting up a central controller for the UAVs and the urgency of emergency communication, the trajectory design problem for these UAVs is formulated as a distributed cooperative optimization problem. Based on the enhanced <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${K}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -mean algorithm and multiagent PPO (MAPPO) algorithm, a cooperative trajectory design method, abbreviated as KMAPPO, is proposed for the UAVs to minimize interaction overhead and optimize deployment efficiency. Compared to the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods, simulations reveal KMAPPO’s superior performance. It converges 32% faster, boosts RF allocation efficiency, and augments FSO communication backhaul capacity.