[2502.03377] Energy-Efficient UAV-assisted LoRa Gateways: A Multi-Agent Optimization Approach

Computer Science > Networking and Internet Architecture arXiv:2502.03377 (cs) [Submitted on 5 Feb 2025 (v1), last revised 25 Mar 2026 (this version, v5)] Title:Energy-Efficient UAV-assisted LoRa Gateways: A Multi-Agent Optimization Approach Authors:Abdullahi Isa Ahmed, Jamal Bentahar, El Mehdi Amhoud View a PDF of the paper titled Energy-Efficient UAV-assisted LoRa Gateways: A Multi-Agent Optimization Approach, by Abdullahi Isa Ahmed and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:As next-generation Internet of Things (NG-IoT) networks continue to grow, the number of connected devices is rapidly increasing, along with their energy demands, creating challenges for resource management and sustainability. Energy-efficient communication, particularly for power-limited IoT devices, is therefore a key research focus. In this paper, we study Long Range (LoRa) networks supported by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in an uplink data collection scenario. Our objective is to maximize system energy efficiency by jointly optimizing transmission power, spreading factor, bandwidth, and user association. To address this challenging problem, we first model it as a partially observable stochastic game (POSG) to account for dynamic channel conditions, end device mobility, and partial observability at each UAV. We then propose a two-stage solution: a channel-aware matching algorithm for end device-UAV association and a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) ba...