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Volume 14
Issue 24
10.3390/electronics14244805
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This is an early access version, the complete PDF, HTML, and XML versions will be available soon.
Article

Spectral Efficiency Beamforming Scheme for UAV MIMO Communication via Budgeted Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit

by
Jing Gao
1,
Yunxing Xiang
1,
Yunchao Song
2,*,
Jing Zhu
1,
Jun Wang
1,
Xiaohui You
1,
Ge Wang
2 and
Tianbao Gao
2
1
State Grid Jiangxi Electric Power Co., Ltd., Nanchang 330006, China
2
College of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommuncations, Nanjing 210023, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Electronics 2025, 14(24), 4805; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14244805 (registering DOI)
Submission received: 2 November 2025 / Revised: 28 November 2025 / Accepted: 4 December 2025 / Published: 6 December 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Massive MIMO and Other Advanced Antenna Techniques for 5G/6G Wireless Systems)
Review Reports Versions Notes

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with antenna arrays can deliver high-capacity, high-throughput, and low-latency communication services. Considering a UAV-assisted mmWave multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) system, a two-stage beamforming scheme based on a budgeted combinatorial multi-armed bandit (BC-MAB) is proposed to improve the system’s spectral efficiency (SE). The pre-beamformer design problem is initially formulated as a BC-MAB problem. In this framework, the reward is the received energy, while the cost corresponds to the energy consumed by each RF chain and the budget is represented by the residual energy of the UAV. To achieve a favorable trade-off between the number of communication slots and the energy acquired per slot, a pre-beamforming scheme based on the bang-per-buck ratio is introduced to optimize the number of activated RF chains, therefore maximizing the cumulative reward. The second stage utilizes the reduced-dimensional instantaneous channel state information to design and optimize the beamformer to achieve maximum system SE. The proposed scheme achieves more than 7.1% improvement in SE compared to the benchmark schemes. Simulations validate the superiority of the proposed scheme.
Keywords: MIMO; millimeter-wave; unmanned aerial vehicle; budgeted combinatorial multi-armed bandit; two-stage beamforming MIMO; millimeter-wave; unmanned aerial vehicle; budgeted combinatorial multi-armed bandit; two-stage beamforming

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MDPI and ACS Style

Gao, J.; Xiang, Y.; Song, Y.; Zhu, J.; Wang, J.; You, X.; Wang, G.; Gao, T. Spectral Efficiency Beamforming Scheme for UAV MIMO Communication via Budgeted Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit. Electronics 2025, 14, 4805. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14244805

AMA Style

Gao J, Xiang Y, Song Y, Zhu J, Wang J, You X, Wang G, Gao T. Spectral Efficiency Beamforming Scheme for UAV MIMO Communication via Budgeted Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit. Electronics. 2025; 14(24):4805. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14244805

Chicago/Turabian Style

Gao, Jing, Yunxing Xiang, Yunchao Song, Jing Zhu, Jun Wang, Xiaohui You, Ge Wang, and Tianbao Gao. 2025. "Spectral Efficiency Beamforming Scheme for UAV MIMO Communication via Budgeted Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit" Electronics 14, no. 24: 4805. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14244805

APA Style

Gao, J., Xiang, Y., Song, Y., Zhu, J., Wang, J., You, X., Wang, G., & Gao, T. (2025). Spectral Efficiency Beamforming Scheme for UAV MIMO Communication via Budgeted Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit. Electronics, 14(24), 4805. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14244805

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