Deploying SDN Control in Internet of UAVs: Q-Learning-Based Edge Scheduling

Nowadays, wilderness monitoring provides massive data output for supporting agricultural production, environmental protection, and disaster monitoring. However, smart upgrading alone for these wireless nodes cannot meet the softwarized network needs today, relating to the explosion of multi-dimensional data and multi-species equipment. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive solution for the UAV based data collection strategy in an “air-to-ground” intelligent softwarized collection system. The innovation in this article is that after using the IoT nodes to complete the data collection process through the proposed bandwidth-weighted traffic pushing optimization (BWPTO) algorithm, the system infers the future changes according to the current network state using a deep Q-learning (DQL) network. Then, by developing the proposed AIIPO (Air-to-Ground Intelligent Information Pushing Optimization) algorithm, the entire network can “forward-looking” the uploaded information to potentially idle nodes in the future, thus achieve the optimized system performance. Through the final mathematical experiments, we prove the optimality of our proposed routing algorithm and forwarding strategy, which are more applicable in the dynamic “air-to-ground” distributed data collection system than other benchmark solutions.