Joint Channel Allocation and Data Delivery for UAV-Assisted Cooperative Transportation Communications in Post-Disaster Networks

As the natural disasters may destroy the ground communication infrastructures for the transportation systems, the communication relief in post-disaster networks is more crucial to reduce risk loss. The growing application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) holds great potential for disaster communication relief due to its flexibility and functionalities. In this paper, we investigate the channel allocation and data delivery problems for UAV-assisted cooperative transportation communications in post-disaster networks to provide communication and data delivery services for affected users. Specifically, we first introduce the UAV-assisted communication relief system, in which UAVs equipped with the communication and caching functionalities are deployed as the aerial base stations in post-disaster regions. Then, we propose the channel allocation scheme between UAVs and users by taking the interferences into consideration, and obtain the channel allocation strategy to improve the network throughput. Based on the optimal channel allocation strategy, users can deliver their data to UAVs for backup. Next, we propose the data delivery scheme to cope with the pricing problem for UAVs and the data delivery strategy for users to improve the efficiency of data delivery, with the objective of maximizing the utilities of both UAVs and users. The optimal strategy for both UAVs and users are derived according to the analysis of Stackelberg game. Finally, we conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed channel allocation and data delivery scheme, and the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of channel allocation and data delivery in post-disaster networks, compared with benchmark schemes.