Budget-Constrained MAB for Trajectory Planning in Aerial-Aided Emergency Networks

In this paper, we introduce a trajectory planning algorithm (TPA) in aerial/unmanned aerial vehicle- (UAV-) aided communications using a practical budget-constrained multiarmed bandit (BC-MAB) in disaster regions. Hence, we propose two cost-efficient TPAs based on two variants of the upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, namely, UCB-BC1 and UCB-BC2, via orthogonal multiple access (OMA) transmission. The former assumes prior information about the minimum expected costs, while the latter estimates the minimum costs from empirical observations. Simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithms outperform other benchmark schemes in terms of the total number of assisted survivors, battery consumption, and convergence speed.