Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Trajectory Design Research Articles

Joint Maneuver and Beamwidth Optimization for UAV-Enabled Multicasting

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-assisted communications have been an essential complement of conventional wireless networks. In this paper, we consider a UAV-enabled multicasting system, where a UAV with a directional antenna of adjustable beamwidth is employed to disseminate a common file to a group of ground users. By minimizing the mission completion time, we investigate how beamwidth control would affect the UAV's three-dimensional (3D) location/trajectory. First, we consider the quasi-stationary UAV scenario, where the UAV is deployed at a static location. In this case, we jointly optimize the 3D UAV location and antenna beamwidth under the practical constraints on the UAV's altitude and beamwidth, while ensuring that all users are covered by the main lobe of the UAV antenna. Although this problem is nonconvex, its global optimality can be obtained by using a two-step algorithm, where semi-closed solutions of the 3D location and beamwidth are derived. Next, in the mobile UAV scenario, a joint 3D UAV trajectory and beamwidth design is proposed, additionally constrained by the horizontal and vertical speed. To tackle this nonconvex problem, we develop an iterative optimization algorithm based on successive convex approximation techniques, which updates the 3D trajectory and beamwidth simultaneously in each iteration. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design as compared to benchmark schemes.

Energy Efficient Estimation in Wireless Sensor Network With Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Distributed estimation is a typical application of wireless sensor network (WSN), where a set of sensor nodes (SNs) collaboratively estimate some parameters of interest from noisy measurements. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled WSN has attracted significant interest since the UAV can collect data energy-efficiently due to its high mobility. In this paper, we consider the joint optimization of UAV trajectory design and SNs' transmission bits allocation for estimating an unknown parameter in UAV-enabled WSN, and the objective is to minimize the total energy consumption of all SNs under the constraint that the mean square error (MSE) of estimation is below a target threshold. The joint optimization problem is formulated with mixed-integer non-convex programming, which is difficult to solve in general. As such, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to solve it by applying the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization techniques. A low-complexity and systematic initialization scheme is also proposed for the trajectory design and transmission bits allocation based on the trade-off structure on the number of visited SNs for estimation. The extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the significant performance gains in terms of total energy consumption of all SNs as compared with other benchmark schemes.

UAV-Enabled Radio Access Network: Multi-Mode Communication and Trajectory Design

In this paper, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled radio access network (RAN) with the UAV acting as an aerial platform to communicate with a set of ground users (GUs) in a variety of modes of practical interest, including data collection in the uplink, data transmission in the downlink, and data relaying between GUs involving both the uplink and downlink. Under this general framework, two UAV operation scenarios are considered: periodic operation, where the UAV serves the GUs in a periodic manner by following a certain trajectory repeatedly, and one-time operation where the UAV serves the GUs with one single fly and then leaves for another mission. In each scenario, we aim to minimize the UAV periodic flight duration or mission completion time, while satisfying the target rate requirement of each GU via a joint UAV trajectory and communication resource allocation design approach. Iterative algorithms are proposed to find efficient locally optimal solutions by utilizing successive convex optimization and block coordinate descent techniques. Moreover, as the quality of the solutions obtained by the proposed algorithms critically depends on the initial UAV trajectory adopted, we propose new methods to design the initial trajectories for both operation scenarios by leveraging the existing results for solving the classic Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Pickup-and-Delivery Problem (PDP). Numerical results show that the proposed trajectory initialization designs lead to significant performance gains compared to the benchmark initialization based on circular trajectory.

Joint Trajectory and Communication Design for Multi-UAV Enabled Wireless Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant interest recently in assisting wireless communication due to their high maneuverability, flexible deployment, and low cost. This paper considers a multi-UAV enabled wireless communication system, where multiple UAV-mounted aerial base stations (BSs) are employed to serve a group of users on the ground. To achieve fair performance among users, we maximize the minimum throughput over all ground users in the downlink communication by optimizing the multiuser communication scheduling and association jointly with the UAVs' trajectory and power control. The formulated problem is a mixed integer non-convex optimization problem that is challenging to solve. As such, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm for solving it by applying the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization techniques. Specifically, the user scheduling and association, UAV trajectory, and transmit power are alternately optimized in each iteration. In particular, for the non-convex UAV trajectory and transmit power optimization problems, two approximate convex optimization problems are solved, respectively. We further show that the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge to at least a locally optimal solution. To speed up the algorithm convergence and achieve good throughput, a low-complexity and systematic initialization scheme is also proposed for the UAV trajectory design based on the simple circular trajectory and the circle packing scheme. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the significant throughput gains of the proposed design as compared to other benchmark schemes.