Joint online 3D trajectory optimisation and power allocation of UAVs as mobile access points in a downlink distributed multi-user MIMO system

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are introduced as one of the key-enablers for 5G beyond networks due to their low cost and flexible deployment, and mobility degrees-of-freedom. Moreover, low sensitivity to blockage and uncorrelated channels in distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO) systems, and their extension which is called cell-free massive MIMO, have made them an attractive research field. The location and number of access points (APs) in D-MIMO systems highly influence the system performance in terms of energy and spectral efficiency that can be handled by UAVs mobility and flexible deployment. In this paper, joint power allocation, and 3D trajectory design in a D-MIMO system for a downlink scenario where multiple UAVs serve as mobile APs (MbAPs) is investigated. Contrary to the existing works in multi-mobile base stations, we introduce space-division multiple access (SDMA) for the online trajectory design as a multi-access technology which does not suffer from the non-casual channel property in traditional trajectory designs. In the proposed design, the smallest user’s ergodic rate lower bound is maximised by jointly optimising MbAPs’ 3D trajectory and transmit power. The block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm is deployed to break the main problem into two sub-problems and iteratively optimise over the two. Considering the non-convex nature of both of sub-problems, successive convex approximation is also exploited. For performance analysis, complexity and convergence property of the proposed algorithm are investigated. Finally, numerical results validate the improved performance of the proposed system in a practical scenario, where users can connect and disconnect to and from the network.