Spatio-Temporal Wireless-Optical Planning for Multi-UAV Networks

Abstract

Multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks in urban low-altitude environments couple UAV mobility, wireless access, and optical backhaul resources. Existing path-planning methods optimize flight distance or wireless signal quality, but can still concentrate traffic on shared optical backhaul links. We present Spatio-Temporal Wireless-Optical (STWO) planner, a backhaul-aware path-planning algorithm that jointly considers flight distance, wireless link quality, and time-varying optical-link offered-load ratio. STWO updates backhaul occupancy during sequential multi-UAV planning, allowing later UAVs to avoid congested optical paths while maintaining wireless connectivity. Experiments show that STWO reduces peak optical-link offered-load ratio by up to 56.4\% and congestion ratio by up to 72.6\% under dense UAV deployment, demonstrating the importance of wireless-optical awareness for reliable multi-UAV transmission.