Energy-Efficient UAV Communication with Multiple GTs Based on Trajectory Optimization

Wireless communications with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a promising technology offering potential high mobility and low cost. This paper studies a UAV-enabled communication system, in which a fixed-wing UAV is deployed to collect information from a group of distributed ground terminals (GTs). Considering the requirements for quality of service (QoS) (i.e., the throughput of each GT is above a given threshold) and GT scheduling, we maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the UAV in bits/Joule by optimizing the UAV’s flight trajectory. In this paper, a mixed integer nonconvex optimization problem is formulated. As that is difficult to solve, we divide the formulated problem into two subproblems and apply standard linear programming (LP) and successive convex optimization techniques. We further propose an efficient iterative algorithm that jointly optimizes GT scheduling and the UAV’s trajectory. Moreover, we set two special cases as benchmarks to measure the performance of the proposed design. The numerical results show that our proposed design achieves much better performance than the other two benchmark designs.