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 practical budget-constrained multiarmed bandit (BC-MAB) disaster regions. Hence, propose two cost-efficient TPAs based on 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 minimum expected costs, while latter estimates costs from empirical observations. Simulation results confirm that proposed algorithms outperform other benchmark schemes terms total number assisted survivors, battery consumption, convergence speed.