Energy-Efficient UAV Communications: A Generalised Propulsion Energy Consumption Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized propulsion energy consumption model for rotary-wing UAVs, optimizing energy efficiency in UAV-enabled communication systems through trajectory and scheduling adjustments.

Contribution

It presents a novel PECM considering practical TWR effects and an efficient iterative algorithm for energy-efficient UAV trajectory optimization.

Findings

Optimized UAV trajectories are smoother with the proposed PECM.

Energy efficiency significantly improves over benchmark schemes.

The model effectively captures real-world propulsion energy dynamics.

Abstract

This paper proposes a generalised propulsion energy consumption model (PECM) for rotary-wing ummanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under the consideration of the practical thrust-to-weight ratio (TWR) with respect to the velocity, acceleration and direction change of the UAVs. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed PECM, we consider a UAV-enabled communication system, where a rotary-wing UAV serves multiple ground users as an aerial base station. We aim to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the UAV by jointly optimizing the user scheduling and UAV trajectory variables. However, the formulated problem is a non-convex fractional integer programming problem, which is challenging to obtain its optimal solution. To tackle this, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm by decomposing the original problem into two sub-problems to obtain a suboptimal solution based on the successive convex approximation technique. Simulation results show that the optimized UAV trajectory by applying the proposed PECM are smoother and the corresponding EE has significant improvement as compared to other benchmark schemes.