Co-planning of Flight Corridors and Communication Infrastructure for Urban Drone Logistics Networks

2026-07-27

AI Summary

This work addresses the inefficiencies in urban drone logistics arising from the decoupled planning of communication infrastructure and flight corridors, which often leads to redundant base stations or unnecessarily circuitous routes. To overcome this, the authors propose the CR-CMAB framework, which jointly optimizes base station placement and flight corridor design to simultaneously minimize infrastructure cost and flight distance while ensuring reliable communication quality. The approach integrates high-fidelity 3D ray tracing to construct accurate channel maps, leverages channel reciprocity to dynamically expand candidate base station locations, and employs a coverage-aware combinatorial multi-armed bandit algorithm for efficient co-planning. Evaluated in realistic urban environments, the method achieves significantly superior performance over baseline approaches—yielding more cost-effective base station deployments and shorter flight paths—with only moderate computational overhead.

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.

Problem

• urban air mobility
• flight corridors
• communication infrastructure
• base station deployment
• UAV logistics

Innovation

• joint optimization
• channel reciprocity
• combinatorial multi-armed bandit
• 3D ray tracing
• urban air mobility