Cellular Controlled Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks with Sense-and-Send Protocol

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cooperative UAV sensing network with a new sense-and-send protocol and an iterative optimization algorithm that reduces task completion time by 15%.

Contribution

It proposes a novel sense-and-send protocol and an ITSSO algorithm for joint trajectory, sensing location, and scheduling optimization in UAV networks.

Findings

ITSSO algorithm reduces task completion time by 15%.

The proposed method effectively coordinates UAVs for sensing tasks.

Convergence and complexity of the algorithm are analyzed.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a cellular controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sensing network in which multiple UAVs cooperatively complete each sensing task. We first propose a sense-and-send protocol where the UAVs collect sensory data of the tasks and transmit the collected data to the base station. We then formulate a joint trajectory, sensing location, and UAV scheduling optimization problem that minimizes the completion time for all the sensing tasks in the network. To solve this NP-hard problem efficiently, we decouple it into three sub-problems: trajectory optimization, sensing location optimization, and UAV scheduling. An iterative trajectory, sensing, and scheduling optimization (ITSSO) algorithm is proposed to solve these sub-problems jointly. The convergence and complexity of the ITSSO algorithm, together with the system performance are analysed. Simulation results show that the proposed ITSSO algorithm saves the task completion time by 15% compared to the non-cooperative scheme.