Joint resource allocation for dynamic cellular‐enabled UAVs communication

Abstract

Emerging cellular-enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communication poses both opportunities and challenges to the current research of UAV applications. On the one hand, the advanced cellular technologies and authentication mechanisms make significant performance improvements of reliability, security, coverage, and throughput of UAVs possible. On the other hand, the considerably dynamic characteristics of the new aerial users bring some complicated and open issues to the future heterogeneous network. To throw some light on this field, the authors study the joint power allocation and channel reuse problem of uplink transmission in a cellular-enabled UAVs network with full consideration of the rapid channel variations resulting from high mobility of UAVs. Given the diverse requirements of terrestrial cellular users (CUs) and UAVs, i.e. large capacity for CU links and ultra-reliability for UAV links, they formulate the problem as optimising the uplink capacities of CUs with reliable transmission constraint of UAVs. By decoupling the intricate problem into two sub-problems, a joint resource allocation algorithm is proposed, which relies only on the statistical information of dynamic channels to implement, hence is robust. Finally, numerical results are provided to corroborate the anticipated performances of the proposed scheme.