Optimal 3D-Trajectory Design and Resource Allocation for Solar-Powered UAV Communication Systems

By Yan Sun, Dongfang Xu, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, Linglong Dai, Robert Schober. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2018

389 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation algorithm design for multicarrier solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication systems. In particular, the UAV is powered by the solar energy enabling sustainable communication services to multiple ground users. We study the joint design of the 3D aerial trajectory and the wireless resource allocation for maximization of the system sum throughput over a given time period. As a performance benchmark, we first consider an off-line resource allocation design assuming non-causal knowledge of the channel gains. The algorithm design is formulated as a mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem taking into account the aerodynamic power consumption, solar energy harvesting, a finite energy storage capacity, and the quality-of-service requirements of the users. Despite the non-convexity of the optimization problem, we solve it optimally by applying monotonic optimization to obtain the optimal 3D-trajectory and the optimal power and subcarrier allocation policy. Subsequently, we focus on the online algorithm design that only requires real-time and statistical knowledge of the channel gains. The optimal online resource allocation algorithm is motivated by the off-line scheme and entails a high computational complexity. Hence, we also propose a low-complexity iterative suboptimal online scheme based on the successive convex approximation. Our simulation results reveal that both the proposed online schemes closely approach the performance of the benchmark off-line scheme and substantially outperform two baseline schemes. Furthermore, our results unveil the tradeoff between solar energy harvesting and power-efficient communication. In particular, the solar-powered UAV first climbs up to a high altitude to harvest a sufficient amount of solar energy and then descends again to a lower altitude to reduce the path loss of the communication links to the users it serves.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f2d83c1cc45b1f0df1b7cf7290bfdd3c64d0000

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Citations in the corpus

Prospective Multiple Antenna Technologies for Beyond 5G (2019, background): “Up to now, there only exists one algorithm for achieving a globally optimal solution of the joint design problem for the case of a single-antenna UAV [178].”
3D Trajectory Optimization in Rician Fading for UAV-Enabled Data Harvesting (2019, background): “Assume that the UAV can independently control the horizontal and vertical flying speeds with the maximum speeds denoted by Vxy and Vz in meter/second (m/s), respectively [33].”
UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond: Recent Advances and Future Trends (2019, background): “[84] further studied a multicarrier solar-powered UAV communication system by jointly taking into account the solar energy harvesting, the aerodynamic power consumption, the dynamics of the on-board energy storage, and the QoS requirements of the ground users.”
A Survey on Millimeter-Wave Beamforming Enabled UAV Communications and Networking (2021, background): “By harvesting energy from ambient environment, such as solar and wind energy, a UAV is able to realize perpetual flight and provide continuous communication service to ground users [319].”