Communication and trajectory design in UAV-enabled flying network

Abstract

Thanks to the flexible deployment, mobility and low cost, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will be widely used in civil and military scenarios. In this paper, a flying network in the sky is considered, where multiple aerial source nodes are equipped with sensing devices to explore the environment and transmit the collected information to the ground station for data fusion and processing. However, there exists distance restriction due to the signal attenuation. Therefore, a UAV is deployed as a flying relay to provide wireless connection. Firstly, we design a time-division multiple access scheme to satisfy the rate requirements. Secondly, to maximize the system throughput under the no-fly zones, flying speed and available energy constraints, we optimize the time, power and flying trajectory. Then we decompose it into three subproblems. To reduce computational complexity, we optimize the power allocation and flying trajectory by applying the Lagrange dual decomposition and the alternating direction method of multipliers, respectively. In conclusion, an overall algorithm is proposed to iteratively optimize these three variables. In the end, we obtain the solution and the simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.