Enhancing Routing Performance Through Trajectory Planning With DRL in UAV-Aided VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have gained significant attention as a key enabler for intelligent transportation systems, facilitating vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Despite their potential, VANETs face critical challenges in maintaining reliable end-to-end connectivity due to their highly dynamic topology and sparse node distribution, particularly in areas with limited infrastructure coverage. Addressing these limitations is crucial for advancing the reliability and scalability of VANETs. To bridge these gaps, this work introduces a heterogeneous UAV-aided VANET framework that leverages uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as autonomous aerial vehicles, to enhance data transmission. The key contributions of this paper include: 1) the design of a novel adaptive dual-model routing (ADMR) protocol that operates in two modes: direct vehicle clustering for intra-cluster communication and UAV/RSU-assisted routing for inter-cluster communication; 2) the development of a modified density-based clustering algorithm (MDBSCAN) for dynamic vehicle node clustering; and 3) an improved UAV trajectory planning method based on a multi-agent soft actor-critic (MASAC) deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which optimizes network reachability. Simulation results reveal that the UAV trajectory optimization method achieves higher network reachability ratios compared to existing approaches. Also, the proposed ADMR protocol improves the packet delivery ratio (PDR) while maintaining low end-to-end latency. These findings demonstrate the potential to enhance VANET performance, while also providing valuable insights for the development of intelligent transportation systems and related fields. © 2025 The Authors.