Service Provisioning and Path Planning With Obstacle Avoidance for Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

This paper investigates the three-dimensional (3D) deployment of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations in heterogeneous communication networks under constraints imposed by diverse ground obstacles. Given the diverse data demands of user devices (UDs), a user satisfaction model is developed to provide personalized services. In particular, when a UD is located within a ground obstacle, the UAV must approach the obstacle boundary to ensure reliable service quality. Considering constraints such as UAV failures due to battery depletion, heterogeneous UDs, and obstacles, we aim to maximize overall user satisfaction by jointly optimizing the 3D trajectories of UAVs, transmit beamforming vectors, and binary association indicators between UAVs and UDs. To address the complexity and dynamics of the problem, a block coordinate descent method is adopted to decompose it into two subproblems. The beamforming subproblem is efficiently addressed via a bisection-based waterfilling algorithm. For the trajectory and association subproblem, we design a deep reinforcement learning algorithm based on proximal policy optimization to learn an adaptive control policy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms baseline schemes in terms of convergence speed and overall system performance. Moreover, it achieves efficient association and accurate obstacle avoidance.