Energy Efficient UAV-Assisted IoT Data Collection: A Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

With the advancements in technologies such as 5G, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have exhibited their potential in various application scenarios, including wireless coverage, search operations, and disaster response. In this paper, we consider the utilization of a group of UAVs as aerial base stations (BS) to collect data from IoT sensor devices. The objective is to maximize the volume of collected data while simultaneously enhancing the geographical fairness among these points of interest, all within the constraints of limited energy resources. Therefore, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method based on Graph Attention Networks (GAT), referred to as “GADRL”. GADRL utilizes graph convolutional neural networks to extract spatial correlations among multiple UAVs and makes decisions in a distributed manner under the guidance of DRL. Furthermore, we employ Long Short-Term Memory to establish memory units for storing and utilizing historical information. Numerical results demonstrate that GADRL consistently outperforms four baseline methods, validating its computational efficiency.