Joint trajectory, transmission time and power optimization for multi-UAV data collecting system

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been generally applied in the field of communication due to their small size, flexible mobility, and convenient deployment. As a mobile base station, the UAV node can quickly establish a line-of-sight link with the ground node, thereby improving communication performance. In this paper, we study a multi-UAV assisted data collecting system. Specifically, in the case of limited system energy consumption, UAV flight energy consumption and ground node data transmission energy consumption are considered as an general limitation, and considering the channel interference between nodes, a multi-UAV assisted data collection model is studied. An non-convex problem that maximizes the minimum amount of data collected from ground nodes is further formulated. Since the original optimization problem is non-convex that difficult to solve directly, the problem is first decomposed into four sub-problems, and then the solution of each sub-problem is obtained by using successive convex approximation and block coordinate descent method. Finally, based on the solution of the four subproblems, an iterative algorithm for joint optimization of data transmission planning, transmission power, UAV trajectory and mission time is proposed. Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm can obtain more transmission data than the baseline algorithms.

Keywords

• Multiple UAVs
• Data collection
• Trajectory optimization
• Collection scheduling
• Transmit power