Paper Info
Title
Towards Power-Efficient Aerial Communications via Dynamic Multi-UAV Cooperation
Abstract
Aerial base stations (BSs) attached to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) constitute a new paradigm for next-generation cellular communications. However, the flight range and communication capacity of aerial BSs are usually limited due to the UAVs’ size, weight, and power (SWAP) constraints. To address this challenge, in this paper, we consider dynamic cooperative transmission among multiple aerial BSs for power-efficient aerial communications. Thereby, a central controller intelligently selects the aerial BSs navigating in the air for cooperation. Consequently, the large virtual array of moving antennas formed by the cooperating aerial BSs can be exploited for low-power information transmission and navigation, taking into account the channel conditions, energy availability, and user demands. Considering both the fronthauling and the data transmission links, we jointly optimize the trajectories, cooperation decisions, and transmit beamformers of the aerial BSs for minimization of the weighted sum of the power consumptions required by all BSs. Since obtaining the global optimal solution of the formulated problem is difficult, we propose a low-complexity iterative algorithm that can efficiently find a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solution to the problem. Simulation results show that, compared with several baseline schemes, dynamic multi-UAV cooperation can significantly reduce the communication and navigation powers of the UAVs to overcome the SWAP limitations, while requiring only a small increase of the transmit power over the fronthauling links.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/WCNC45663.2020.9120587
2020 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
unmanned aerial vehicles,next-generation cellular communications,flight range,communication capacity,power constraints,dynamic cooperative transmission,multiple aerial base station,low-power information transmission,data transmission links,cooperation decisions,power consumptions,dynamic multiUAV cooperation,navigation powers,transmit power,power-efficient aerial communications,aerial base station navigating,SWAP constraints,size-weight and power constraints,central controller,cooperating aerial base station,virtual array,moving antennas,low-power information navigation,trajectory optimization,transmit beamformers,low-complexity iterative algorithm,Karush-Kuhn-Tucker solution,UAV communication,UAV navigation,fronthauling links
Conference
1525-3511
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-3107-8
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiang Lin100.34
Lei Lei222622.40
Symeon Chatzinotas31849192.76
Björn E. Ottersten46418575.28
Robert Schober58448488.41