Co-planning of Flight Corridors and Communication Infrastructure for Urban Drone Logistics Networks
2026-07-27 • Robotics
RoboticsNetworking and Internet Architecture
AI summaryⓘ
The authors address the challenge of ensuring good wireless connections for drones flying in city airspaces by planning where to put communication towers and how drones should fly together. Unlike earlier work that planned towers and flight paths separately, they combine these tasks to save money and reduce extra flying. They designed a smart method called CR-CMAB that uses detailed radio signal maps and a special search strategy for the best tower locations. Their tests show this method works better than others by placing towers more effectively and shortening drone routes. This helps make urban drone networks more reliable and cost-efficient.
Urban Air Mobility (UAM)Base Station (BS) DeploymentUAV Flight CorridorsWireless Connectivity3D Ray TracingCombinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB)Channel ReciprocityRadio MapsCommunication Quality ConstraintsSmart Cities
Authors
Yingjie He, Yikang Wang, Zhenyu Gao
Abstract
Reliable wireless connectivity is essential for urban air mobility (UAM) networks in dense urban environments. It is therefore imperative to carefully plan the supporting communication infrastructure for UAM flight corridors. Most existing works optimize communication infrastructure and UAV flight paths independently, often leading to unnecessary base station (BS) deployment or excessive flight detours. This paper studies the joint optimization of BS deployment and UAV flight corridors in complex urban environments, aiming to minimize both infrastructure investment and flight distance while satisfying communication quality constraints. We propose CR-CMAB, a channel reciprocity-guided combinatorial multi-armed bandit framework. The framework constructs high-fidelity radio maps using 3D ray tracing, selects BS combinations via coverage-aware CMAB search, and dynamically expands the search space by identifying promising BS locations through channel reciprocity. Experimental results from a detailed case study demonstrate that CR-CMAB outperforms baseline methods with moderate computational time, yielding more strategically positioned BSs and shorter flight corridors. This study offers a practical planning perspective for cost-effective and communication-reliable UAM deployment in future smart cities.