Height-Fixed UAV Enabled Energy-Efficient Data Collection in RIS-Aided Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor nodes (SNs) are usually energy-limited, a low energy efficiency of SN may be caused by the occlusion of transmission link in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled data collection. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) provide potential communication opportunities by reflecting and enhancing the signal, thus increasing SNs’ energy efficiency. This paper investigates energy-efficient data collection aided by <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</i> RIS elements, where a height-fixed and flight time-constrained UAV is considered as the collector, a tractable air-to-ground channel model is established considering the cascaded RIS channel and time-varying trajectory of UAV, and energy consumption of SNs is minimized. Specifically, coupling two intractable fourth-order moment variables, the air-to-ground channel model is processed into an easily computable expression through the Gamma function. Furthermore, based on the proposed two RIS deployment schemes, maximum energy consumption of SNs minimization problem is formulated as a non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming (NMNP) problem with optimization of UAV trajectory and SNs wake-up schedules. Additionally, through the slack technique and Taylor expansion, the NMNP problem is decoupled as linear programming and quadratically constrained quadratic programming, and an effective algorithm is designed to obtain the sub-optimal solution. Simulations prove the validity of our algorithm and RIS deployment insights are given for SNs energy saving.