Delay-constrained throughput maximization in UAV-enabled OFDM systems

Abstract

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations (BSs) is of great practical significance in future wireless networks, especially for on-demand deployment during a temporary event and emergency situation. Although prior works have demonstrated the performance improvement brought by the UAV mobility, they mainly focus on the delay-tolerant applications such as file transfer and data collection. As such, it is unknown if the UAV mobility is able to provide performance gain for delay-constrained applications, such as video conferencing and online gaming. Motivated by this, we study in this paper a UAV-enabled downlink orthogonal division multiple access (OFDMA) network where a UAV is dispatched to serve two ground users within a given flight period. By taking into account the delay-specified minimum-rate-ratio constraints of the users, our goal is to maximize the minimum user throughput by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and communication resource allocation. We show that the max-min user throughput in general decreases as the minimum-rate-ratio constraints become more stringent, which reveals a fundamental tradeoff between the throughput gain by exploiting the UAV mobility and the user delay requirement. Simulation results verify our theoretical findings and also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed design.