UAV Relay-Assisted Emergency Communications in IoT Networks: Resource Allocation and Trajectory Optimization

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication has emerged as a prominent technology for emergency communications (e.g., natural disaster) in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks to enhance the ability of disaster prediction, damage assessment, and rescue operations promptly. A UAV can be deployed as a flying base station (BS) to collect data from time-constrained IoT devices and then transfer it to a ground gateway (GW). In general, the latency constraint at IoT devices and UAV’s limited storage capacity highly hinder practical applications of UAV-assisted IoT networks. In this paper, full-duplex (FD) radio is adopted at the UAV to overcome these challenges. In addition, half-duplex (HD) scheme for UAV-based relaying is also considered to provide a comparative study between two modes (viz., FD and HD). Herein, a device is considered to be successfully served if its data is collected by the UAV and conveyed to GW timely during flight time. In this context, we aim to maximize the number of served IoT devices by jointly optimizing bandwidth, power allocation, and the UAV trajectory while satisfying each device’s requirement and the UAV’s limited storage capacity. The formulated optimization problem is troublesome to solve due to its non-convexity and combinatorial nature. Towards appealing applications, we first relax binary variables into continuous ones and transform the original problem into a more computationally tractable form. By leveraging inner approximation framework, we derive newly approximated functions for non-convex parts and then develop a simple yet efficient iterative algorithm for its solutions. Next, we attempt to maximize the total throughput subject to the number of served IoT devices. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform benchmark approaches in terms of the number of served IoT devices and system throughput.