Joint trajectory and communications design for high air-interface-resource efficiency

Abstract

Applying aerial devices to collect data from terrestrial sensors is a research hotspot in recent years. In this paper, we consider a novel system model that terrestrial sensors’ data are first collected by low-altitude UAVs and then transferred to a relatively-high-altitude central processor. We formulate the model in such an air-ground integrated system as a non-convex optimization problem of maximizing the air-interface-resource efficiency (AIRE) by jointly optimizing the trajectories and communication schedules. By using techniques of block coordinate descent (BCD) and successive convex approximation (SCA), the proposed problem is relaxed and transformed into three subproblems, which can be solved by iteration. Simulation results show the optimized trajectories and communication schedules, and the designed schemes perform better than the benchmarks.