Completion Time Minimization for Turning Angle-Constrained UAV-to-UAV Communications

Abstract

This paper investigates UAV-to-UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) communications with a turning angle constraint, in which the information transmission time is minimized by joint UAV flight path planning and transmit power control. Considering the communication throughput requirement, peak transmit power, energy consumption, UAV flight speed, collision avoidance, and turning angle constraints, the joint UAV flight path planning and transmit power control problem is formulated as a non-convex optimization. Different from majority of prior studies that separately optimize the UAV flight path and transmit power, we develop a successive convex approximation based time minimization algorithm that simultaneously updates the UAV path and transmit power. We further prove that the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge. In addition, an initialization scheme is designed to start the proposed time minimization algorithm by solving an energy minimization problem. Simulation results verify that the proposed time minimization algorithm can shorten the completion time length and reduce the computational complexity compared with state of the art methods.