Distributed DRL-Based Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation in Cooperative UAV-Enabled Intelligent Transportation Systems

The integration of sensing, communication, and computation (ISCC) is a critical technology that will support various emerging wireless services in future 6G networks. The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with edge servers can be used as an aerial service platform in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) to offer ISCC services to vehicles. This article studies an aerial UAV network comprising a central UAV and secondary UAVs to realize sensing of the global ITS environment and data fusion computation through collaborative UAVs. To enhance the service performance of ISCC, we maximize the success rate of ISCC services and the energy efficiency of UAVs by jointly optimizing bandwidth allocation, power allocation, and computing capacity control while ensuring the sensing and data processing latency requirements. Leveraging the network architecture and collaboration requirements of UAVs, we propose the multi-UAV collaborative Air-ISCC (MCAI) algorithm based on the asynchronous advantage actor-critic algorithm, which obtains the optimal ISCC service policy by co-training a deep reinforcement learning model with multiple UAVs. Sufficient experimental results show that MCAI enhances energy efficiency by 10.51% to 80.12% compared with the baselines. Moreover, MCAI exhibits good scalability, strengthening its feasibility in real scenarios.