Optimizing UAV Trajectory for Emergency Response Operations under Real 3-D Environments: Integrating Priority Levels and LoS Constraints

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a critical component in next-generation wireless networks, particularly for disaster recovery scenarios, due to their flexibility, mobility, and rapid deployment capabilities. This article focuses on optimizing rotary-wing UAV trajectories to ensure effective communication in disaster-stricken areas using terahertz links. We address specific challenges, such as energy consumption, user priority levels, and navigating complex urban environments, to maintain line-of-sight connections amid 3-D obstacles. Our contributions include the development of a detailed modeling approach using online 3-D map data, the formulation of an optimal trajectory optimization problem, and the proposal of a genetic-algorithm-based method alongside an enhanced heuristic algorithm for faster convergence. Through 3-D simulations, we demonstrate the tradeoff between minimizing total service time and prioritizing higher weight nodes, showing the impact of different priority weight factors on the trajectory time. The proposed algorithms are evaluated using real-world data from the West Bay area of Doha, Qatar, demonstrating their effectiveness in optimizing UAV trajectories for emergency response.