Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Aided Communications: Joint Transmit Power and Trajectory Optimization

TL;DR

This paper proposes a joint optimization of UAV transmit power and trajectory to enhance wireless communication performance for ground nodes, demonstrating improved throughput through an efficient algorithm.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint optimization framework for UAV power and trajectory, addressing a dynamic scenario with multiple ground nodes, which is less explored in prior fixed infrastructure studies.

Findings

Optimized transmit power exhibits a water-filling pattern in space.

The proposed algorithm significantly improves minimum average throughput.

Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the joint optimization approach.

Abstract

This letter investigates the transmit power and trajectory optimization problem for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided networks. Different from majority of the existing studies with fixed communication infrastructure, a dynamic scenario is considered where a flying UAV provides wireless services for multiple ground nodes simultaneously. To fully exploit the controllable channel variations provided by the UAV's mobility, the UAV's transmit power and trajectory are jointly optimized to maximize the minimum average throughput within a given time length. For the formulated non-convex optimization with power budget and trajectory constraints, this letter presents an efficient joint transmit power and trajectory optimization algorithm. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and reveal that the optimized transmit power shows a water-filling characteristic in spatial domain.