Throughput enhancement of buffer-aided multi-hop UAV relaying wireless networks

Abstract

Due to the advantages of high mobility, flexibility and fast reconfiguration, the interest of applying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to wireless communications is growing rapidly in the past decade. A multiple UAVs relaying wireless network is considered in this paper, where buffer-aided UAVs form a multi-hop aerial relaying network to provide the reliable wireless communication services for ground terminals where the direct communication link is unavailable. Considering the buffer constraints, the link selection constraints, the transmit power constraints and the UAV mobility constraints, the average throughput is maxiesqmized. Nevertheless, the formulated optimization problem is intractable because it involves mixed-integer non-convex programming. To track this problem, an iterative algorithm is proposed which can efficient obtain a suboptimal to the original problem. Numerical results validate that this algorithm is convergent and efficient. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed design can greatly enhance the system performance as compared to benchmark schemes.