Timely Ground-Station Status Delivery via UAV-Assisted Data Collection and Hierarchical RL
Abstract
We consider a UAV-assisted status-update system in which a rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collects updates from multiple sensors, stores the newest update of each sensor, and forwards selected buffered updates to a ground station (GS). We minimize a weighted sum of the time-average GS-side age of information (AoI) and UAV energy consumption over a finite horizon. The optimization is subject to half-duplex operation, sensor and UAV energy-causality constraints, transmission-rate and power limits, and a terminal-location constraint. Because collection changes the information age at the UAV but does not reduce the GS-side AoI until the buffered update is forwarded, mobility, collection, and forwarding decisions are coupled over time. We use a hierarchical AoI-energy actor-critic (HAE-AC) controller in which a coarse-timescale actor selects return-feasible UAV movements, while a deterministic per-slot scheduler constructs feasible collection or forwarding sets and assigns the minimum transmit power required for each scheduled transmission. In a 100-sensor deployment, HAE-AC reduces the average GS-side AoI by about 22% relative to an adaptive staleness-gated benchmark. Compared with forward-upon-collection, selective buffered forwarding reduces the number of downlink bursts by roughly 30% while increasing the number of collections per sensor by more than 23%.
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BibTeX
@misc{gao2026timely,
title = {{Timely Ground-Station Status Delivery via UAV-Assisted Data Collection and Hierarchical RL}},
author = {Xiangjian Gao and Mohammad Moltafet and Hamid R. Sadjadpour},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.03884},
eprint = {2611.03884},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03884},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Timely Ground-Station Status Delivery via UAV-Assisted Data Collection and Hierarchical RL
AU - Xiangjian Gao
AU - Mohammad Moltafet
AU - Hamid R. Sadjadpour
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.03884
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03884
AB - We consider a UAV-assisted status-update system in which a rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collects updates from multiple sensors, stores the newest update of each sensor, and forwards selected buffered updates to a ground station (GS). We minimize a weighted sum of the time-average GS-side age of information (AoI) and UAV energy consumption over a finite horizon. The optimization is subject to half-duplex operation, sensor and UAV energy-causality constraints, transmission-rate and power limits, and a terminal-location constraint. Because collection changes the information age at the UAV but does not reduce the GS-side AoI until the buffered update is forwarded, mobility, collection, and forwarding decisions are coupled over time. We use a hierarchical AoI-energy actor-critic (HAE-AC) controller in which a coarse-timescale actor selects return-feasible UAV movements, while a deterministic per-slot scheduler constructs feasible collection or forwarding sets and assigns the minimum transmit power required for each scheduled transmission. In a 100-sensor deployment, HAE-AC reduces the average GS-side AoI by about 22% relative to an adaptive staleness-gated benchmark. Compared with forward-upon-collection, selective buffered forwarding reduces the number of downlink bursts by roughly 30% while increasing the number of collections per sensor by more than 23%.
ER -