Digital-Twin-Empowered Cluster Formation via Over-the-Air Computation in UAV Swarm Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms are key enablers for cooperative intelligent tasks in Internet of Everything (IoE) environments, like environmental monitoring and disaster response. Meanwhile, Digital Twin (DT) technology is rapidly advancing in academia and industry due to its potential to design, test, and optimize evolving IoE networks. While DT-empowered UAV swarms provide a compelling solution for complex tasks, challenges remain in jointly designing swarm control and service provision strategies, especially in dynamic IoE environments. To harness the potential of UAV swarm intelligence, we propose a DT-empowered cluster formation technique employing the Over-the-Air Computation (AirComp) transmission scheme for energy-efficient IoE data aggregation, where UAV and IoE device clusters are dynamically constructed and adjusted. Furthermore, we consider the limited power resources by maximizing energy efficiency, which leads to a joint cluster formation, multi-UAV trajectory design, and power allocation problem under the constraint of AirComp signal distortion. To efficiently solve this mixed-integer nonlinear fractional programming problem, we develop a low-complexity iterative algorithm based on the block coordinate descent method. Simulation results show that the proposed DT-empowered AirComp cluster formation technique achieves up to 42% higher energy efficiency and 34% greater throughput than the baselines, validating its potential for efficient data aggregation tasks.