Age of Information Based Scheduling for UAV Aided Emergency Communication Networks

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been widely adopted to assist sensing, localization and communication for ground devices (GDs), especially for emergency applications. Since the location of GDs cannot be perfect known to UAVs in such cases, we present a novel UAV aided sensing, localization and communication integrated system. We first introduce the idea of age of information (AoI) to evaluate the timeliness of information from GDs, which is essentially determined by the time of UAV movement, localization operation and data transmission. In particular, we focus on the time-critical network scheduling policies, which could be formulated as a joint UAV trajectory, UAV three-dimensional location and bandwidth allocation optimization problem. This Non-convex problem can be decoupled into two subproblems, which could be solved by specified low complexity algorithms. Simulation results are provided, and can verify the effectiveness in timeliness of our proposed scheduling strategies.