Scheduling UAV Swarm with Attention-based Graph Reinforcement Learning for Ground-to-air Heterogeneous Data Communication

In disaster scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can serve as mobile base stations because of their maneuverability and synergy. However, due to constrained UAV communication capabilities and limited battery life, UAV base stations resource allocation for mobile sensors in a data-heterogeneous environment is a significant challenge when optimizing communication quality. To address this, we propose AGUZero, an attention-based graph reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Inspired by MuZero [27], AGUZero is designed to handle dynamic and uncontrollable environments based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Additionally, to tackle data heterogeneity, AGUZero represents the states using heterogeneous sub-graphs and employs an attention-based model to capture relationships among UAVs and sensors. The experimental results show that AGUZero outperforms other baseline models consistently when either the number of UAVs or the number of sensors is varying. AGUZero improves the data transmission ratio by 11.03% and 10.35% in the two cases respectively.