Task Assignment in UAV-Enabled Front Jammer Swarm: A Coalition Formation Game Approach

Abstract

Thanks to the low detectability and low cost of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), UAV-enabled front swarm jamming has been considered a promising method to counter netted radar systems. Nevertheless, the task assignment problem of the UAV-enabled front jammer swarm has rarely been studied. Due to the low load capacity of the UAV and dynamic task environment, the task assignment of the UAV-enabled front jammer swarm faces the following two main challenges. 1) The hardware performance of the jammer nodes is limited. 2) The optimal task assignment scheme is dynamic. To address the above issues, a distributed dynamic task assignment approach is studied for the UAV-enabled front jammer swarm in this article. First, we design the utility function of the UAV-enabled front jammer swarm based on the quality of service (QOS) framework, and formulate the task assignment of the UAV-enabled front jammer swarm as a multiagent coordination problem. Then, the coalition formation game (CFG) of jammers for the task assignment is formulated to reveal the coordination process of the jammers. Finally, a distributed coalition formation based UAV-enabled front jammer swarm dynamic task assignment algorithm is proposed, which can achieve similar performance to the centralized optimization via a distributed approach and is suitable for dynamic environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is highly competitive to deal with the task assignment problem of the UAV-enabled front jammer swarm.