Co-planning of Flight Corridors and Communication Infrastructure for Urban Drone Logistics Networks

Urban air mobility (UAM) networks, particularly drone logistics, require reliable wireless connectivity in dense urban environments. The supporting communication infrastructure for UAM flight corridors must be carefully planned to ensure seamless operation. However, most existing works optimize communication infrastructure and UAV flight paths independently, which often leads to unnecessary base station (BS) deployment or excessive flight detours. This paper addresses the joint optimization of BS deployment and UAV flight corridors in complex urban environments. The objective is to minimize both infrastructure investment and flight distance while satisfying communication quality constraints. The authors propose CR-CMAB, a channel reciprocity-guided combinatorial multi-armed bandit framework, to solve this joint planning problem. The study offers a practical planning perspective for cost-effective and communication-reliable UAM deployment in future smart cities.

The authors conducted a detailed case study in a complex urban environment to evaluate the performance of CR-CMAB. The results demonstrate that CR-CMAB outperforms baseline methods in terms of both infrastructure cost and flight distance. Specifically, CR-CMAB yields more strategically positioned BSs and shorter flight corridors compared to independent optimization approaches. The computational time required by CR-CMAB is moderate, making it practical for real-world deployment. Quantitative comparisons show that CR-CMAB reduces the number of required BSs by a significant margin while maintaining communication quality constraints. The flight corridors are also shortened, leading to reduced energy consumption and operational costs for drone logistics.