UAV-Aided Wireless Communication Designs With Propulsion Energy Limitations

This paper studies unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided wireless communication systems where a UAV supports uplink communications of multiple ground nodes (GNs) while flying over the area of the interest. In this system, the propulsion energy consumption at the UAV is taken into account so that the UAV’s velocity and acceleration should not exceed a certain threshold. We formulate the minimum average rate maximization problem and the energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem by jointly optimizing the trajectory, velocity, and acceleration of the UAV and the uplink transmit power at the GNs. As these problems are non-convex in general, we employ the successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques. To this end, proper convex approximations for the non-convex constraints are derived, and iterative algorithms are proposed which converge to a local optimal point. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform baseline schemes for both problems. Especially for the EE maximization problem, the proposed algorithm exhibits about 109 % gain over the baseline scheme.