UAV-Aided Two-Way Relaying for Wireless Communications of Intelligent Robot Swarms

Abstract

In this paper, we consider unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled two-way relaying communications between two robot swarms in the absence of communication infrastructures in remote areas or post-disaster rescues. To be more specific, UAV is employed as the relay to expand the communication range between two disconnected ground robot swarms, due to its high maneuverability and flexible deployment. Meanwhile, the two-way relaying mode adopted can improve the transmission performance in terms of delay and throughput in comparison to the conventional one-way relaying, owing to the ability of allowing devices to exchange information simultaneously. In addition, the UAV's trajectory and power allocation are jointly optimized to maximize the sum-rate of the uplink and downlink, where the joint optimization problem is decoupled into two sub-problems to address the non-convexity. Limited to the non-convex formation of the objective function for the trajectory optimization sub-problem, we firstly handle the non-convexity based on successive convex approximation method, and then alternating optimization framework is carried out to obtain the joint suboptimal solution. Numerical results exhibit significant throughput gains of the proposed scheme as compared to other benchmark schemes.

Keywords

• Robot swarms
• UAV communications
• two-way relaying
• non-convex optimization