AURA-GreeN: Aerial Utility-driven Route Adaptation for Green cooperative Networks

In this paper, we introduce an innovative aerial utility-driven route adaptation for green cooperative networks (AURA-GreeN) to enhance wireless communication coverage and information freshness through the integration of distributed aerial radio units, with a particular emphasis on urban aerial mobility solutions, especially for intelligent transportation, disaster response, and search and rescue operations. AURA-GreeN can be deployed as an xAPP on the Open-Radio Access Network (O-RAN) framework, where the network metrics are readily available through the E2 interface. It takes advantage of the unique mobility provided by these vehicles to function as agile, aerial distributed radio units (D-RU) while realizing the value of information freshness in aerial vehicle deployment operations. Using such an approach, we can significantly bolster the network's sustainability, coverage, and resiliency to bridge the connectivity gap and provide reliable data rates. We address the challenge of ensuring low-latency communication in a distributed environment by formulating a joint optimization problem that efficiently allocates the available spectrum among urban aerial mobility vehicles, thereby minimizing the Age of Information (AoI) between the source and destination while operating under a total power budget. Unlike the conventional routing techniques that fail to adapt to highly dynamic channel conditions, we consider not only the distance and the number of hops between the nodes within the aerial network but also the network metrics and interference. The evaluation was performed through a multi-objective assessment of latency, spectrum efficiency, and service reliability on an xApp deployed at the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). Simulation results affirm the effectiveness of our AURA-GreeN routing approach, with an exceptional improvement in AoI by 460% over equitable routing and 50.85% over conventional routing methods by choosing the Pareto optimal solutions satisfying the 3GPP V2X standards. The solution is generic enough to be extended to any specific use case scenario or industry specifications for latency, reliability, and data rate.