Optimization of the Trajectory, Transmit Power, and Power Splitting Ratio for Maximizing the Available Energy of a UAV-Aided SWIPT System

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the maximization of the available energy for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system, in which the ground terminals (GTs) decode information and collect energy simultaneously from the downlink signal sent by the UAV based on a power splitting (PS) policy. To guarantee that each GT has a fair amount of available energy, our aim is to optimize the trajectory and transmit power of the UAV and the PS ratio of the GTs to maximize the minimum average available energy among all GTs while ensuring the average spectral efficiency requirement. To address the nonconvexity of the formulated optimization problem, we apply a successive convex optimization technique and propose an iterative algorithm to derive the optimal strategies of the UAV and GTs. Through performance evaluations, we show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing baseline schemes in terms of the max–min available energy by adaptively controlling the optimization variables according to the situation.

Keywords

• unmanned aerial vehicle
• energy harvesting
• trajectory
• SWIPT
• convex optimization