In this paper, we propose a novel Hybrid-Hierarchical spatial-aerial-Terrestrial Edge-Centric (H2TEC) for the space-air integrated Internet of Things (IoT) networks. (H2TEC) comprises unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that act as mobile fog nodes to provide the required services for terminal nodes (TNs) in cooperation with the satellites. TNs in (H2TEC) offload their generated tasks to the UAVs for further processing. Due to the limited energy budget of TNs, a novel task allocation protocol, named TOP, is proposed to minimize the energy consumption of TNs while guaranteeing the outage probability and network reliability for which the transmission rate of TNs is optimized. TOP also takes advantage of the energy harvesting by which the low earth orbit satellites transfer energy to the UAVs when the remaining energy of the UAVs is below a predefined threshold. To this end, the harvested power of the UAVs is optimized alongside the corresponding harvesting time so that the UAVs can improve the network throughput via processing more bits. Numerical results reveal that TOP outperforms the baseline method in critical situations that more power is required to process the task. It is also found that even in such situations, the energy harvesting mechanism provided in the TOP yields a more efficient network throughput.

In this paper, the distributed cooperative communication of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is studied, where the condition number (CN) and the inner product (InP) are used to measure the quality of communication links. By optimizing the relative position of UAVs, large channel capacity and stable communication links can be obtained. Using the spherical wave model under the line of sight (LOS) channel, CN expression of the channel matrix is derived when there are Nt transmitters and two receivers in the system. In order to maximize channel capacity, we derive the UAVs position constraint equation (UAVs-PCE), and the constraint between BS elements distance and carrier wavelength is analyzed. The result shows there is an area where no matter how the UAVs' positions are adjusted, the CN is still very large. Then a special scenario is considered where UAVs form a rectangular lattice array, and the optimal constraint between communication distance and UAVs distance is derived. After that, we derive the InP of channel matrix and the gradient expression of InP with respect to UAVs' position. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to minimize the CN and the gradient descent (GD) algorithm is used to minimize the InP by optimizing UAVs' position iteratively. Both of the two algorithms present great potentials for optimizing the CN and InP respectively. Furthermore, a hybrid algorithm named PSO-GD combining the advantage of the two algorithms is proposed to maximize the communication capacity with lower complexity. Simulations show that PSO-GD is more efficient than PSO and GD. PSO helps GD to break away from local extremum and provides better positions for GD, and GD can converge to an optimal solution quickly by using the gradient information based on the better positions. Simulations also reveal that a better channel can be obtained when those parameters satisfy the UAVs position constraint equation (UAVs-PCE), meanwhile, theory analysis also explains the abnormal phenomena in simulations.

In the large-scale multi-UAV systems, the direct link may be invalid for two remote nodes on account of the constrained power or complex communication environment. Idle UAVs may work as relays between the sources and destinations to enhance communication quality. In this letter, we investigate the opportunistic relay selection for the UAVs dynamic network. On account of the time-varying channel states and the variable numbers of sources and relays, relay selection becomes much more difficult. In addition, information exchange among all nodes may bring much cost and it is difficult to implement in practice. Thus, we propose a decentralized relay selection approach based on mood-driven mechanism to combat the dynamic characteristics, aiming to maximize the total capacity of the network without information exchange. With the proposed approach, the sources can make decisions only according to their own current states and update states according to immediate rewards. Numerical results show that the proposed approach has attractive properties.

Positioning information plays a significant role in multi-unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) applications. Traditionally, the positioning information is widely provided by Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) due to its good performance and global coverage. However, owing to complicated flight environment or signal blockage, jamming and unintentional interference, the UAVs may fail to locate themselves by using GNSS alone. As a new method to resolve these problems, cooperative positioning, by incorporating peer-to-peer range measurements and assisted information, has attracted more and more attentions due to its ability to enhance the accuracy and availability of positioning. However, achieving good performance of cooperative positioning of multi-UAVs is challenging as their mobility, arbitrary nonlinear state-evolution, measurement models and limited computation and communication resources. In this paper, we present a factor graph (FG) representation and message passing methodology to solve cooperative positioning problem among UAVs in 3-dimensional environment where GNSS cannot provide services. Moreover, to deal with the nonlinear state-evolution and measurement models while decreasing the computation complexity and communication cost, we develop a distributed algorithm for dynamic and hybrid UAVs by means of Spherical-Radial Cubature Rules (CR) method with belief propagation (BP) and variational message passing (VMP) methods (CRBP-VMP) on the FG. The proposed CRBP deals with the highly non-linear state-evolution models and non-Gaussian distributions, the VMP method is employed for ranging message, gets the simpler message representation and can reduce communication cost in the joint estimation problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the higher positioning accuracy, the better convergence as well as low computational complexity and communication cost of the proposed CRBP-VMP algorithm, which can be achieved compared with sum-product algorithm over a wireless network (SPAWN) and traditional Cubature Kalman Filters (CKF) method.