Power allocation and energy cooperation for uav‐enabled mmwave networks: A multi‐agent deep reinforcement learning approach

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)‐assisted cellular networks over the millimeter‐wave (mmWave) frequency band can meet the requirements of a high data rate and flexible coverage in next‐generation communication networks. However, higher propagation loss and the use of a large number of antennas in mmWave networks give rise to high energy consumption and UAVs are constrained by their low‐capacity onboard battery. Energy harvesting (EH) is a viable solution to reduce the energy cost of UAV‐enabled mmWave networks. However, the random nature of renewable energy makes it challenging to maintain robust connectivity in UAV‐assisted terrestrial cellular networks. Energy cooperation allows UAVs to send their excessive energy to other UAVs with reduced energy. In this paper, we propose a power allocation algorithm based on energy harvesting and energy cooperation to maximize the throughput of a UAV‐assisted mmWave cellular network. Since there is channel‐state uncertainty and the amount of harvested energy can be treated as a stochastic process, we propose an optimal multi‐agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm (DRL) named Multi‐Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) to solve the renewable energy resource allocation problem for throughput maximization. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the Random Power (RP), Maximal Power (MP) and valuebased Deep Q‐Learning (DQL) algorithms in terms of network throughput.