UAV Trajectory Planning from a Comprehensive Energy Efficiency Perspective in Harsh Environments

Abstract

As a highly promising application paradigm, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in wireless communications have gained widespread attention by virtue of their advantages, such as low cost and high agility. Unfortunately, the discharge capacity of onboard batteries will be greatly weakened in harsh environments, thereby reducing the expected endurance of the UAV. To this end, a UAV data distribution system with expected data requirements is considered in this article. Our objective is to reassess the trade-off between UAV mission time and its propulsion energy consumption (PEC), and provide a novel designing perspective for energy-efficient UAV deployment based on trajectory planning. First, we analyze the energy consumption composition and approximate the PEC to the total energy consumption of the UAV. Then, based on the “hover-fly-communicate” design, we focus on the factors that affect mission time and PEC. Furthermore, the simulation results illustrate the influence of critical system parameter settings on the propulsion energy consumption efficiency (PEC-E) of the UAV. Finally, future research is discussed, and the article is concluded.