Multi-UAV Collaborative Sensing and Communication: Joint Task Allocation and Power Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel multi-UAV cooperative sensing and transmission scheme with replicated task allocation, optimizing task distribution and power to minimize mission completion time through advanced optimization techniques.

Contribution

It proposes a new replicated sensing task allocation scheme and formulates an optimization problem, solved via monotonic optimization and auxiliary variables, to improve multi-UAV sensing efficiency.

Findings

Replicated sensing reduces overall mission completion time.

The optimization problem is effectively solved using the Polyblock algorithm.

Closed-form solutions are derived for non-replicated sensing cases.

Abstract

Compared to a single UAV with limited sensing coverage and communication capability, multi-UAV cooperation is able to provide more effective sensing and transmission (S&T) services. Nevertheless, most existing works on multi-UAV sensing mainly focus on mutually exclusive task allocation and independent data transmission, which did not fully exploit the benefit of multi-UAV sensing and communication. Motivated by this, we propose a novel multi-UAV cooperative S&T scheme with replicated sensing task allocation. Although replicated task allocation may sound counter-intuitive, it can actually foster cooperative transmission among multiple UAVs and thus reduce the overall sensing mission completion time. To obtain the optimal task allocation and transmit power of the proposed scheme, a mission completion time minimization problem is formulated. To solve this problem, a necessary condition for replicated sensing task allocation is derived. For the cases of replicated sensing, the considered problem is transformed into a monotonic optimization and is solved by the generic Polyblock algorithm. To efficiently evaluate the mission completion time in each iteration of the Polyblock algorithm, new auxiliary variables are introduced to decouple the otherwise sophisticated joint optimization of transmission time and power. While for the degenerated case of non-replicated sensing, the closed-form expression of the optimal transmission time is derived