Joint Uplink-and-Downlink Optimization of 3-D UAV Swarm Deployment for Wireless-Powered IoT Networks

Abstract

This article investigates a full-duplex orthogonal-frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based multiple unmanned-aerial-vehicles (UAVs)-enabled wireless-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. In this paper, a swarm of UAVs is first deployed in 3-D to simultaneously charge all devices, i.e., a downlink (DL) charging period, and then flies to new locations within this area to collect information from scheduled devices in several epochs via OFDMA due to potential limited number of channels available in IoT during an uplink (UL) communication period. To maximize the UL throughput of IoT devices, we jointly optimize the UL-and-DL 3-D deployment of the UAV swarm, including the device-UAV association, the scheduling order, and the UL-DL time allocation. In particular, the DL energy harvesting threshold of devices and the UL signal decoding threshold of UAVs are taken into consideration when studying the problem. Besides, both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight channel models are studied depending on the position of sensors and UAVs. The influence of potential limited number of channels in IoT is also considered. Guidelines on the 3-D placement of UAVs in the DL charging and the UL communications are also given. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed optimal time allocation OFDMA-UAV scheme achieves significant throughput gains compared with conventional schemes.