Dynamic UAV Deployment for Differentiated Services: A Multi-Agent Imitation Learning Based Approach

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been utilized to serve on-ground users with various services, e.g., computing, communication and caching, due to their mobility and flexibility. The main focus of many recent studies on UAVs is to deploy a set of homogeneous UAVs with identical capabilities controlled by one UAV owner/company to provide services. However, little attention has been paid to the issue of how to enable different UAV owners to provide services with differentiated service capabilities in a shared area. To address this issue, we propose a multi-agent imitation learning enabled UAV deployment approach to maximize both profits of UAV owners and utilities of on-ground users. Specially, a Markov game is formulated among UAV owners and we prove that a Nash equilibrium exists based on the full knowledge of the system. For online scheduling with incomplete information, we design agent policies by imitating the behaviors of corresponding experts. A novel neural network model, integrating convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial networks and a gradient-based policy, can be trained and executed in a fully decentralized manner with a guaranteed $\epsilon$e-Nash equilibrium. Performance results show that our algorithm has significant superiority in terms of average profits, utilities and execution time compared with other representative algorithms.

Automated summary

This study proposes a multi-agent imitation learning enabled UAV deployment approach to enable different UAV owners to provide services with differentiated service capabilities in a shared area. The goal is to maximize both profits of UAV owners and utilities of on-ground users.