Minimizing Energy Consumption in Wireless Rechargeable UAV Networks

Abstract

With the development of airborne equipment and integrated avionics technology, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network replaces human beings in many works. However, the limited energy capacity of UAVs has great restrictions on long-time missions. To prolong the lifetime of the UAV network, we introduce the wireless static chargers (WSCs) into the UAV network, and a nondisruptive wireless rechargeable UAV network (WRUN) model is proposed, in which UAVs can be wirelessly charged without returning back to the charging platform and WSCs are scheduled to turn on and release energy only in the charging time periods. The goal of this article is to minimize the energy waste of WSCs under the premise that UAVs will not run out of energy. To calculate the efficient charging time periods of WSCs, we first discretize flight paths of UAVs so that the nondisruptive charging time schedule problem (nCTSP) that has an infinite solution space both in the spatial and time dimensions can be formalized as an optimization problem. Then, we propose the baseline algorithm exhaust candidate solutions (ECSs) to calculate the charging time periods and propose an improved algorithm using the idea of pruning (PECS) to reduce the computational complexity of ECS. Finally, experiments are conducted and PECS achieves better performance in terms of saving energy consumption and maximizing energy utilization.