Self-Energized UAV-Assisted Scheme for Cooperative Wireless Relay Networks

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently been envisaged as an enabling technology of 5G. UAVs act as an intermediate relay node to facilitate uninterrupted, high quality communication between information sources and their destination. However, UAV energy management has been a major issue of consideration due to limited power supply, affecting flight duration. Thus, we introduce in this paper a unified energy management framework by resorting to wireless power transfer (WPT), simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and self-interference (SI) energy harvesting (EH) schemes, in cooperative relay communications. In our new technique, UAVs are deployed as relays equipped with a decode and forward protocol and EH capability operating in a full-duplex (FD) mode. The UAV assists information transmission between a terrestrial base station and a user. The UAV's transmission capability is powered exclusively by the energy harvested from WPT, radio frequency signal transmitted from the source via time-switching SWIPT protocol and SI exploitation. We improve the overall system throughput by the use of FD based UAV-assisted cooperative system. In this proposed system, we formulate two optimization problems to minimize end-to-end outage probability, subject to UAV's power profile and trajectory for a DF relay scheme, respectively. The KKT conditions have been used to obtain closed-form solutions for the two formulated problems. Numerical simulation results validate all the theoretical results. We demonstrate that the performance of our proposed unified EH scheme outperforms that of existing techniques in the literature.