Interference-Aware UAV Path Planning on Grid SINR Maps With Event-Triggered Updates

Urban unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation operates under tight bandwidth, compute, and latency budgets. Interference and building blockage cause rapid link fluctuations, making interference-aware path planning on grid signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) maps essential for reliable communication. In this paper, we formulate the problem as a joint update–navigation decision: map uncertainty triggers on-demand partial refreshes that are co-optimized with motion under a bandwidth budget. We introduce UT-Grid, an uncertainty-triggered grid-update framework, that refreshes conditionally triggered upon necessity to reduce overall map-update traffic, and MoE-D3QN, a Dueling Double DQN with sparse Mixture-of-Experts (Top-1 routing) that activates a single expert per step, cutting per-decision active parameters and FLOPs while matching or surpassing comparable dense D3QN planners. In an urban simulation with multi-source interference, the framework outperforms static-map, periodic-refresh, and dense D3QN baselines, increasing reaching probability and path efficiency while markedly reducing communication overhead.