Multiobjective Optimization for Improving Throughput and Energy Efficiency in UAV-Enabled IoT

Abstract

Unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-aided wireless communication in Internet of Things (IoT) applications is becoming the focus of attention of researchers. This article investigates a UAV-assisted communication system for serving IoT, in which multiple rotary-wing UAVs are employed to communicate with multiple terrestrial IoT devices. Specifically, we formulate a UAV deployment multiobjective optimization problem (UAVDMOP) to simultaneously maximize the minimum throughput of the UAV–device pairs, maximize the total throughput of the whole system, and minimize the total energy consumptions of UAVs via a joint optimization of the locations of UAVs, transmission power of UAVs, and association relationship between the UAVs and IoT devices. UAVDMOP consists of both discrete and continuous solution spaces, which is difficult to be solved. Thus, we propose an improved discrete and continuous multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (IDCMOEA/D) with a hybrid solution initialization operation and a hybrid solution reproduction operation for increasing the performance of the algorithm so that making it more suitable for dealing with the UAVDMOP. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective to enhance the throughput and energy efficiency of the system and it has superior performance compared to other methods.