Minimizing Mission Completion Time of UAVs by Jointly Optimizing the Flight and Data Collection Trajectory in UAV-Enabled WSNs

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used to collect data from ground nodes (GNs) in various applications because of their flexibility and mobility. Some emergency situations pose strict requirements for UAV’s mission completion time. The current research focuses on the design and optimization of UAV’s flight trajectory to shorten the mission completion time. But the data collection process also greatly affects the mission completion time, especially when the uplink throughput is large. This article emphasizes the data collection process and proposes a V-shaped collection trajectory for the first time to shorten UAV’s collection time and then jointly optimizes the flight and collection trajectory to minimize the mission completion time. We formulate the mission completion time under energy constraints to an optimization problem and decompose it into three subproblems: 1) mission allocation of UAVs; 2) collection time minimization; and 3) joint optimization of collection and flight trajectory. 1) We establish the mission allocation model by setting the scaling factors for the flight and collection mission, and then solve it by utilizing the min–max multiple traveling salesman problem (MTSP) algorithm; 2) for the data collection process, we propose a V-shaped trajectory to minimize the data collection time and prove its validity; and 3) since the flight and collection trajectory of the adjacent GNs are deeply coupled, we model the joint optimization of the flight and the collection time as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, and solve it by the joint optimization algorithm for flight trajectory and collection trajectory (JOFC). The simulation results show that our proposal outperforms the compared schemes.