Trajectory Design and Resource Allocation for UAV-Enabled Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks with 3D Blockages

Abstract

In this paper, we study the trajectory design and resource allocation for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled data collection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) considering the potential blockages caused by multiple three-dimensional (3D) buildings. We aim to maximize the average data collection rate via jointly designing the sensor node (SN) scheduling for data collection, the transmit power, and the UAV’s trajectory. To this end, the design is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem taking into account the existence of blockages and the potential of data buffer overflow at SNs. Since the formulated problem is intractable, we propose an iterative algorithm to obtain an efficient suboptimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve substainal performance gain in terms of data collection for different number of SNs over other baseline schemes.