Optimal Scheduling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks with Flow-Level Dynamics

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Networks have recently attracted great attention as being able to provide convenient and fast wireless connections. One central question is how to allocate a limited number of UAVs to provide wireless services across a large number of regions, where each region has dynamic arriving flows and flows depart from the system once they receive the desired amount of service (referred to as the flow-level dynamic model). In this article, we propose a MaxWeight-type scheduling algorithm taking into account sharp flow-level dynamics that efficiently redirect UAVs across a large number of regions. However, in our considered model, each flow experiences an independent fading channel and will immediately leave the system once it completes its service, which makes its evolution quite different from the traditional queueing model for wireless networks. This poses significant challenges in our performance analysis. Nevertheless, we incorporate sharp flow-dynamic into the Lyapunov-drift analysis framework, and successfully establish both throughput and heavy-traffic optimality of the proposed algorithm. Extensive simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.