Energy‐Efficient UAV Communications

Abstract

The propulsion energy consumption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is usually much more significant than their communication‐related energy. This chapter aims to introduce the fundamental concepts and main design techniques for energy‐efficient UAV communications. It is noted that the energy efficiency maximization problem corresponds to one instance of the generic problem formulation for joint UAV trajectory and communication resource optimization. An important formulation for energy‐efficient UAV communications is to minimize the UAV energy consumption, while satisfying the targeting communication performance. While most existing works study the energy consumption of either ground users or UAVs, there exists an interesting trade‐off for the energy consumption between the types of nodes for UAV‐assisted wireless communications. Intuitively, the closer the UAV flies to the ground nodes, the less energy is needed for the ground nodes to complete its transmission of a given amount of data. However, this usually comes at the cost of more UAV energy consumption.