UAV-assisted Cooperative Communications with Wireless Information and Power Transfer

In this paper, we focus on a typical cooperative communication system with one pair of source and destination, where a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flying from a start location to an end location serves as a mobile relay. To efficiently utilize energy in ambient environment, the UAV’s transmission capability is powered exclusively by radio signal transmitted from the source via the power-splitting mechanism. In such a cooperative communication system, we study the end-to-end cooperative throughput maximization problem by optimizing the UAV’s power profile, power-splitting ratio profile and trajectory for both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols. The problem is decomposed into two subproblems: profile optimization given trajectory and trajectory optimization given profile. The former one is solved via the dual decomposition with in-depth analysis and the latter one is solved via successive convex optimization, by which a lower bound is iteratively maximized. Then the end-to-end cooperative throughput maximization problem is solved by alternately solving the two subproblems. The numerical results show that with the proposed optimal solution, choice for the UAV’s power profile and power-splitting ratio profile is more long-sighted than the greedy strategy from our previous work and the successive optimization is able to converge in a few rounds of iteration. Moreover, as for the end-to-end cooperative throughput, the proposed optimal solution outperforms both static and greedy strategies, especially for the AF protocol. Index Terms Cooperative communications, UAV-assisted communications, wireless power and information transfer.