UAV-Aided Vehicular Communication Design With Vehicle Trajectory’s Prediction

Abstract

This letter studies the optimization of a UAV-aided vehicular communication system where a rotary-wing UAV serves a moving vehicle. Considering the propulsion energy of the UAV, our goal is to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the system by optimizing UAV trajectory. Due to the causality of the vehicle location information (VLI), the formulated optimization problem is challenging to solve. To address the VLI causality issue, a vehicle's trajectory prediction framework is proposed, in which a short-term accurate trajectory prediction model and a long-term coarse trajectory prediction model are integrated. Based on the proposed vehicle's trajectory prediction framework, a novel receding horizon optimization method is proposed to transform the EE maximization problem into a sequence of optimization problems, in which a time window of the short-term vehicle's trajectory prediction is successively moved along the vehicle's trip. By solving the sequence of optimization problems, an energy-efficient UAV's trajectory optimization algorithm is obtained. Simulation results verify that our proposed scheme can achieve about 20%-40% EE performance gains over existing baseline schemes.