Performance Analysis of Charging Infrastructure Sharing in UAV and EV-involved Networks

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a wireless charging infrastructure sharing strategy between UAVs and EVs, demonstrating that sharing can significantly reduce UAV charging wait times with minimal impact on EV service quality, using stochastic geometry and optimization models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of infrastructure sharing between UAVs and EVs, modeling trade-offs between cost, profit, and service quality with stochastic geometry and optimization.

Findings

Sharing increases EV waiting time by up to 5 minutes.

Sharing reduces UAV waiting time by over 50 minutes.

More charging stations improve performance but increase costs.

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) show great potential in modern transportation and communication networks, respectively. However, with growing demands for such technologies, the limited energy infrastructure becomes the bottleneck for their future growth. It might be of high cost and low energy efficiency for all the operators to each have their own dedicated energy infrastructure, such as charging stations. In this paper, we analyze a wireless charging infrastructure sharing strategy in UAV and EV-involved networks. We consider a scenario where UAVs can charge in EV charging stations and pay for the sharing fee. On the EVs' side, sharing infrastructure can earn extra profit but their service quality, such as waiting time, might slightly reduce. On the UAVs' side, if renting EV charging stations can achieve an acceptable system performance, say high coverage probability, while considering the cost, they may not need to build their dedicated charging stations. In this case, we use tools from stochastic geometry to model the locations and propose an optimization problem that captures the aforementioned trade-offs between cost or profit and quality of service. Our numerical results show that sharing infrastructure slightly increases the waiting time of EVs, say within $5$ min, but dramatically decreases the waiting time of drones, say more than $50$ min, and deploying more charging stations do achieve better performances, but all these better performances are expected to cost more.