Integrated UAV Swarm Architecture for Wireless Communication and Drone Logistics in GNSS-Denied Smart Warehouses

Reliable wireless communication in indoor transportation environments remains a major challenge. Signal attenuation, multipath propagation, and dynamic obstacles significantly degrade communication reliability in logistics warehouses and automated industrial facilities. Conventional Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) enhance the coverage but still have the limitation that they are statically deployed. Recent researches have proposed that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used as mobile relay nodes for wireless link connections in complex environments. This study proposes a hybrid communication architecture of Distributed Antenna Systems and UAV-Assisted Relays and Machine Learning based optimization technique for indoor transportation and warehouse environment to enhance wireless coverage and reliability. The proposed framework contains a combination of a DAS infrastructure and autonomous UAV relay nodes. An indoor propagation model is used to assess the behavior of the signals, and a machine learning based optimization algorithm is used to find out the optimal UAV positioning to maximize the quality of the signal and minimize the communication latency. Simulation results show that under the UAV assisted DAS architecture, coverage probability and the average signal quality are improved with respect to the conventional DAS deployments, and communication latency is reduced for the dynamic indoor scenarios. The proposed hybrid system offers an adaptive solution for indoor transport communication networks to allow enhanced reliability and scalability for smart warehouses and automated logistics systems. Also, based on the proposed architecture, UAV platforms can be used to complete aerial logistics tasks, including inventory verification, cargo delivery between warehouse areas, and real-time infrastructure surveillance, thus changing the communication relay network into a multi-purpose aerial logistics support platform.

Distributed antenna system (DAS); Indoor wireless communication; Reinforcement learning; UAV swarm networks; Warehouse automation

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