SWIPT‐PS Enabled Cache‐Aided Self‐Energized UAV for Cooperative Communication

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a major role in advancements of Internet of Things (IoT) applications for smart cities in next‐generation communication networks. The emergence of diverse IoT applications (i.e. intelligent transportation systems, smart environmental applications, etc.) required reliable quality of service (QoS) of edge users to be increased as much as possible. Therefore, UAV‐assisted communication is being increasingly used as a potential technique to enable robust and reliable communication between base stations and the edge users. As a contribution in this direction, a self‐energized UAV‐based cache‐assisted communication network is investigated, in which a source node communicates with a group of edge users with the aid of a UAV. In order to prolong the UAV's serving time, the UAV is equipped with cache memory and energy‐harvesting capability. We use power‐splitting simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (PS‐SWIPT) technique to power up the UAV's communication capabilities. Then, the effects of caching, energy harvesting, source transmission power, operational time, and the UAV's trajectory on the system performance are analyzed in terms of the achievable information rate at the edge users. In particular, two optimization problems are formulated to maximize the achievable throughput at the users and the trajectory of the UAVs, which guarantee a maximum information rate at the edge users while maintaining the QoS requirement. Finally, numerical simulation results are provided to validate the theoretical analysis provided in this chapter.