UAV-RIS-Aided Energy-Efficient and QoS-Aware Emergency Communications Based on DRL

Ensuring reliable communication can be incredibly challenging in emergencies due to the breakdown of conventional infrastructure. However, a promising solution is on the horizon: the integration of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) onto unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), known as UAV-RIS. This innovative approach holds the potential to offer agile and adaptable communication services during crises, overcoming the limitations of traditional systems. This paper establishes an innovative UAV-RIS system with an active RIS to enhance the uplink communication between ground devices (GDs) and the air base station (ABS). We present an advanced communication strategy utilizing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for UAV-RIS-supported uplink communication in dynamic emergencies. This scheme is designed to optimize the energy efficiency of the UAV-RIS communication system while adhering to quality of service (QoS) constraints for all GDs. It achieves this by jointly optimizing the trajectory of the UAV-RIS and the phase of the active RIS, ensuring efficient and reliable communication in challenging environments. To optimize the performance of the system, we propose a hierarchical Proximal Policy Optimization (H-PPO) algorithm and the upper and lower layers of H-PPO optimize the trajectory and phase control, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme can effectively learn the communication strategy to enhance the performance of dynamic emergency communication networks.