Ultra-Dense Uplink UAV Lossy Communications: Trajectory Optimization Based on Mean Field Game

This paper investigates a multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled network for supporting emergency communication services, where each drone acts as a base station (also called the drone small cell (DSC)). The novelty of this paper is that a mean field game (MFG)-based strategy is conceived for jointly controlling the three-dimensional (3D) locations of these drones to guarantee the distortion requirement of lossy communications, while considering the inter-cell interference and the flight energy consumption of drones. More explicitly, we derive the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) and Fokker–Planck–Kolmogorov (FPK) equations, and propose an algorithm where both the Lax–Friedrichs scheme and the Lagrange relaxation are invoked for solving the HJB and FPK equations with 3D control vectors and state vectors. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a higher access rate with a similar flight energy consumption.