Paper Info
Title
Optimal 3D-Trajectory Design and Resource Allocation for Solar-Powered UAV Communication Systems.
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation algorithm design for multicarrier solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication systems. In particular, the UAV is powered by the solar energy enabling sustainable communication services to multiple ground users. We study the joint design of the 3D aerial trajectory and the wireless resource allocation for maximization of the system sum throughput over a given time period. As a performance benchmark, we first consider an off-line resource allocation design assuming non-causal knowledge of the channel gains. The algorithm design is formulated as a mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem taking into account the aerodynamic power consumption, solar energy harvesting, a finite energy storage capacity, and the quality-of-service requirements of the users. Despite the non-convexity of the optimization problem, we solve it optimally by applying monotonic optimization to obtain the optimal 3D-trajectory and the optimal power and subcarrier allocation policy. Subsequently, we focus on the online algorithm design that only requires real-time and statistical knowledge of the channel gains. The optimal online resource allocation algorithm is motivated by the off-line scheme and entails a high computational complexity. Hence, we also propose a low-complexity iterative suboptimal online scheme based on the successive convex approximation. Our simulation results reveal that both the proposed online schemes closely approach the performance of the benchmark off-line scheme and substantially outperform two baseline schemes. Furthermore, our results unveil the tradeoff between solar energy harvesting and power-efficient communication. In particular, the solar-powered UAV first climbs up to a high altitude to harvest a sufficient amount of solar energy and then descends again to a lower altitude to reduce the path loss of the communication links to the users it serves.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/TCOMM.2019.2900630
IEEE Transactions on Communications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Resource management,Communication systems,Trajectory,Solar energy,Unmanned aerial vehicles,Optimization,Aerodynamics
Resource management,Online algorithm,Mathematical optimization,Algorithm design,Control theory,Computer science,Communications system,Resource allocation,Throughput,Optimization problem,Computational complexity theory
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
abs/1808.00101
6
0090-6778
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
33
0.79
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
yan sun11334.08
Dongfang Xu21315.61
Derrick Wing Kwan Ng33588189.08
Linglong Dai42713135.60
Robert Schober58448488.41