Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Assisted UAV Communication: Joint Trajectory Design and Passive Beamforming

By Sixian Li, Bin Duo, Xiaojun Yuan, Ying-Chang Liang, M. Di Renzo. IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, 2019

590 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Thanks to the line-of-sight (LoS) transmission and flexibility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) effectively improve the throughput of wireless networks. Nevertheless, the LoS links are prone to severe deterioration by complex propagation environments, especially in urban areas. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), as a promising technique, can significantly improve the propagation environment and enhance communication quality by intelligently reflecting the received signals. Motivated by this, the joint UAV trajectory and RIS’s passive beamforming design for a novel RIS-assisted UAV communication system is investigated to maximize the average achievable rate in this letter. To tackle the formulated non-convex problem, we divide it into two subproblems, namely, passive beamforming and trajectory optimization. We first derive a closed-form phase-shift solution for any given UAV trajectory to achieve the phase alignment of the received signals from different transmission paths. Then, with the optimal phase-shift solution, we obtain a suboptimal trajectory solution by using the successive convex approximation (SCA) method. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can considerably improve the average achievable rate of the system.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d959e1816b7ed12bdb761405b4013478d21e64b3

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Citations in the corpus

A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks With UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence (2020, methodology): “munication by exploiting passive beamforming [125]–[130], [132]–[135], [137].”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial (2020, methodology): “On the other hand, terrestrial IRS can also be employed to help enhance the UAV-ground communication performance via optimized signal reflections [132], [133].”
Simultaneously Transmitting And Reflecting (STAR) RIS Aided Wireless Communications (2021, background): “The signiﬁcant beneﬁts of deploying RISs in wireless networks have also been veriﬁed in the context of physical layer security [21], unmanned aerial vehicle systems [22], and robotic communications systems [23].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Principles and Opportunities (2020, methodology): “An RIS can be leveraged for enhancing the performance of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled wireless networks [24], cellular-connected UAV networks [25], autonomous vehicular networks and autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) networks by fully reaping the aforementioned RIS benefits.”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [227], the authors study the joint design of the trajectory of an UAV and the beamforming design of an RIS in order to maximize the average achievable rate.”
A Survey on Millimeter-Wave Beamforming Enabled UAV Communications and Networking (2021, methodology): “Each element is able to independently reflect the incident signals and adjust their amplitudes and phases [80].”
Toward Smart Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: A Contemporary Survey (2019, unknown): “In [187], the authors introduce an IRS-assisted UAV communication network in which the on-building IRS is used to enhance communication quality from UAV to the ground user.”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How it Works, State of Research, and Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [226], the authors study the joint design of the trajectory of an UAV and the beamforming design of an RIS in order to maximize the average achievable rate.”
A Joint Precoding Framework for Wideband Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Cell-Free Network (2020, background): “In addition, the secure transmission via RIS has been investigated in [32], and RIS was also considered to assist the communication using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) [33].”
IRS-Assisted Secure UAV Transmission via Joint Trajectory and Beamforming Design (2022, unknown): “One type is the IRS-assisted UAV communication network [26]– [29], where the IRS installed on the surface of a building is introduced to help reflect the signal between the UAV and ground nodes.”
What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, methodology): “RISs could be deployed on the façades of high-rise buildings and controlled to create signal reﬂections that enhance the reliability of air-to-ground links when the latter are, e.g., blocked by other buildings.”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Millimeter Wave Communications: Joint Active and Passive Precoding Design (2019, background): “In [24]–[30], IRS was also considered as an auxiliary facility to assist secret communications, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications and wireless power transfer.”