On-Demand Multiplexing of eMBB/URLLC Traffic in a Multi-UAV Relay Network

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay networks with flexible and controllable characteristics are expected to complement the capacity of the gNB. This paper studies the multiplexing of enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) and Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) in a multi-UAV relay network, where the strict latency requirement of URLLC can be achieved by the preemptive multiplexing of eMBB resources. However, this may affect eMBB reliability due to the transmission interruptions. Moreover, given the limited energy resources of UAVs, there is an inherent tradeoff among reliability, delay, spectral efficiency, and energy efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper develops a hierarchical UAV-assisted eMBB/URLLC multiplexing scheduling framework. For the eMBB scheduler, we first utilize multiple UAVs to assist the gNB in relaying eMBB traffic and formulate the eMBB resource allocation problem as an optimization problem. Then, we propose a decomposition-relaxation-optimization algorithm to maximize eMBB data rates while considering the personalized fairness of resource allocation and UAV power consumption. For the URLLC scheduler, we further consider the multiplexing of eMBB/URLLC traffic based on the optimization of eMBB resources. To reduce the performance fluctuations of eMBB, we propose a novel cross-slot strategy to schedule URLLC within two time slots rather than one time slot as in existing works. With this strategy, a deep reinforcement learning-based algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal strategy for the preemption of URLLC on eMBB. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms outperform the benchmark schemes in terms of convergence rate, eMBB reliability, personalized resource fairness, UAV consumption, and URLLC satisfaction.