Joint Resource Allocation on Slot, Space and Power Towards Concurrent Transmissions in UAV Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

With innovative applications of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) ad hoc networks in various areas, their demands on broad bandwidth, large capacity and low latency become prominent. The combination of millimeter wave, directional antenna and time division multiple access techniques, which enables concurrent transmissions, is promising to deal with it. In this paper, we study the resource allocation problem in UAV ad hoc networks. Specifically, the slot assignment, antenna boresight and transmit power are jointly optimized to promote the network capacity. First, we formulate the optimization problem as the maximization of the fairness-weighted network capacity, subject to the constraint on priority guarantee. Then, because the formulated problem is a mixed integer non-linear programming problem (MINLP), which is NP-hard, two algorithms called dual-based iterative search algorithm (DISA) and sequential exhausted allocation algorithm (SEAA) are respectively proposed to efficiently solve it with acceptable complexity. DISA slacks the MINLP into a continuous-variable optimization problem and solves it with the Lagrangian dual method in an iterative manner. As a heuristic method, SEAA schedules links sequentially, i.e., from high-priority to low-priority ones. Numerical results demonstrate that both DISA and SEAA can efficiently allocate resources for UAVs, while guaranteeing the fairness and priority of links.