Mobile Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Energy-Efficient Internet of Things Communications

By Mohammad Mozaffari, Walid Saad, Medhi Bennis, Merouane Debbah. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2017

978 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, the efficient deployment and mobility of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), used as aerial base stations to collect data from ground Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are investigated. In particular, to enable reliable uplink communications for the IoT devices with a minimum total transmit power, a novel framework is proposed for jointly optimizing the 3D placement and the mobility of the UAVs, device-UAV association, and uplink power control. First, given the locations of active IoT devices at each time instant, the optimal UAVs’ locations and associations are determined. Next, to dynamically serve the IoT devices in a time-varying network, the optimal mobility patterns of the UAVs are analyzed. To this end, based on the activation process of the IoT devices, the time instances at which the UAVs must update their locations are derived. Moreover, the optimal 3D trajectory of each UAV is obtained in a way that the total energy used for the mobility of the UAVs is minimized while serving the IoT devices. Simulation results show that, using the proposed approach, the total-transmit power of the IoT devices is reduced by 45% compared with a case, in which stationary aerial base stations are deployed. In addition, the proposed approach can yield a maximum of 28% enhanced system reliability compared with the stationary case. The results also reveal an inherent tradeoff between the number of update times, the mobility of the UAVs, and the transmit power of the IoT devices. In essence, a higher number of updates can lead to lower transmit powers for the IoT devices at the cost of an increased mobility for the UAVs.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4bb7d334bfb9cf71262f691d656d5b7a058b8fca

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Citations in the corpus

Ultra Reliable UAV Communication Using Altitude and Cooperation Diversity (2017, methodology): “2746105 UAVs have also been used in the context of Internet of Things (IoT) to assist low power transmitters to send their data to a destination [5], [6], and to enable energy-efficient communication [7], [8].”
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Communications and Control for Wireless Drone-Based Antenna Array (2017, background): “Related work on UAV communications There has been a recent surge of literature discussing the use of drones for wireless communication purposes [2]–[9], [11]–[15].”
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Survey on Collaborative Smart Drones and Internet of Things for Improving Smartness of Smart Cities (2019, background): “It was reported that IoT transmitted power can be reduced by 45% while increasing the yield to a maximum of 28% [13].”
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Cellular UAV-to-X Communications: Design and Optimization for Multi-UAV Networks (2018, background): “The overlay U2N transmission offers direct link from UAVs with high SNR to the BS, and thus provides a high data rate [14], [15].”
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Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing (2020, background): “Moreover, UAVs can assist with information dissemination or data collection by ﬂying over the speciﬁc areas [31], [32].”
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UAV Trajectory Planning for Data Collection from Time-Constrained IoT Devices (2020, methodology): “In [25], the authors deployed multiple UAVs for collecting data from ground IoT devices, where the total uplink transmit power of these IoT devices is minimized in a time-varying network by optimizing the UAV’s trajectory and IoT power control.”