Cooperative Coverage Control for Multiple Stratospheric Airships in Emergency Communication Missions

Emerging emergency communication scenarios demand robust, efficient, and fair wireless coverage in environments where terrestrial infrastructure is unavailable. Multiple stratospheric airship (MSA) systems offer significant advantages in coverage and deployment flexibility, but also pose substantial challenges for autonomous cooperative control under uncertainty. This paper addresses the multi-agent cooperative exploration and coverage control problem for MSA in disaster-area emergency communication missions. The problem is formulated as a constrained maximization problem, where the deployment and motion of the airships are coordinated to maximize exploration efficiency, communication quality, and service fairness. To this end, we propose a distributed cooperative control framework for MSA systems. A virtual guiding force (VGF) method is developed to unify the exploration and coverage phases, while a frontier-based cooperative exploration algorithm with auction-based task allocation enables efficient discovery of unknown regions. In addition, a fairness-aware communication control scheme (FCCS) is integrated to improve resource allocation among ground users. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods in exploration efficiency, coverage effectiveness, fairness, and computational cost, validating its potential for practical emergency communication applications.