LAURA: LLM-Assisted UAV Routing for AoI Minimization

Abstract: With the rapid growth of the low-altitude economy, there is increasing demand for real-time data collection using UAV-assisted wireless sensor networks. This paper investigates the problem of minimizing the age of information (AoI) in UAV-assisted wireless sensor networks by optimizing the UAV flight routing. We formulate the AoI minimization task and propose a LLM-assisted UAV routing algorithm (LAURA). LAURA employs an LLM as intelligent crossover operators within an evolutionary optimization framework to efficiently explore the solution space. Simulation results show that LAURA outperforms benchmark methods in reducing the maximum AoI, especially in scenarios with a large number of sensor nodes.