Joint UAV Flight and Opportunistic Routing under Reinforcement Learning for Delay-Tolerant Networks

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 5 Aug 2026] Joint UAV Flight and Opportunistic Routing under Reinforcement Learning for Delay-Tolerant Networks Xiao Wang, Shun-Ren Yang The growing deployment of delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) has made store-carry-forward (SCF) communication indispensable under sparse connectivity. However, intermittent contacts, finite buffers, and limited message time-to-live (TTL) often give rise to sparse delivery and congestion, leading to substantial end-to-end performance degradation. To address this challenge, this study explores the joint optimization of decentralized opportunistic routing and controllable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight, aiming to enlarge future contacts through discrete UAV headings while enabling per-node replication under contact-limited observations. Building upon this architecture, we study cooperative factored routing--UAV control under centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) and propose JUROR (Joint UAV flight and Opportunistic Routing, based on the proximal policy optimization (PPO) framework. In our design, we first cast the problem as a factored partially observable Markov decision process with sequential motion--routing coupling and a per-step team reward; subsequently, decentralized actors act on local observations while a training-time critic uses global statistics, and an optional multi-horizon hotspot predictor provides auxiliary supervision. Simulation results over four traffic modes demonstrate effective gains over PRoPHET and MaxProp, while retaining contact-limited decentralized execution. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2608.04590 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2608.04590v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04590 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Xiao Wang [view email] [v1] Wed, 5 Aug 2026 08:51:41 UTC (642 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)