Resource Allocation for Power-Efficient IRS-Assisted UAV Communications

In this paper, an intelligent reflection surface (IRS) is introduced to assist an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for serving multiple ground users. We aim to minimize the average total power consumption of the system by jointly optimizing the resource allocation strategy, UAV's trajectory and velocity, as well as phase control at the IRS. To this end, a non-convex optimization problem is formulated taking into account the individual minimum data rate requirement and the limited energy budget of the IRS. The problem is generally intractable. As a compromise approach, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm to obtain an effective suboptimal solution. Numerical results evaluate that the enormous power saving can be achieved by the proposed algorithm for different energy budgets of the IRS compared with other baseline schemes.