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We investigate a transmission mechanism aiming to improve the data rate between a base station (BS) and a user equipment (UE) through deploying multiple relaying UAVs. We consider the effect of interference incurred by another established communication network, which makes our problem challenging and different from the state of the art. We aim to design the 3D trajectories and power allocation for the UAVs to maximize the data flow of the network while keeping the interference on the existing communication network below a threshold. We utilize the mobility feature of the UAVs to evade the (un)-intended interference caused by (un)-intentional interferers. To this end, we propose an alternating-maximization approach to jointly obtain the 3D trajectories and the UAVs transmission powers. We handle the 3D trajectory design by resorting to spectral graph theory and subsequently address the power allocation through convex optimization techniques. We also approach the problem from the intentional interferer’s perspective where smart jammers chase the UAVs to effectively degrade the data flow of the network. We also extend our work to the case for multiple UEs. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method through extensive simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance optimization of UAV communication systems requires the joint design of UAV trajectory and communication efficiently. To tackle the challenge of infinite design variables arising from the continuous-time UAV trajectory optimization, a commonly adopted approach in the existing literature is by approximating the UAV trajectory with piecewise-linear path segments connected via a finite number of waypoints in three-dimensional (3D) space. However, this approach may still incur prohibitive computational complexity in practice when the UAV flight period/distance becomes long, as the distance between consecutive waypoints needs to be kept sufficiently small to retain high approximation accuracy. To resolve this fundamental issue, we propose in this paper a new and general framework for UAV trajectory and communication co-design with flexible number of waypoint optimization variables (called designable waypoints) or their sub-path representations. First, we propose a flexible path discretization scheme that optimizes only a number of selected waypoints (designable waypoints) along the UAV path for complexity reduction, while all the designable and non-designable waypoints are used in calculating the approximated communication utility along the UAV trajectory for ensuring high trajectory discretization accuracy. Next, we propose a novel path compression scheme, which treats the UAV trajectory as a signal and compresses its path representation based on the basis decomposition. Specifically, the UAV 3D path is first decomposed into three one-dimensional (1D) sub-paths and each sub-path is then approximated by superimposing a number of selected basis paths (which are generally less than the number of designable waypoints) weighted by their corresponding path coefficients, thus further reducing the path design complexity. Finally, we provide a case study on UAV trajectory design for aerial data harvesting from distributed sensors, and numerically show that the proposed flexible path discretization and path compression schemes can significantly reduce the UAV trajectory design complexity yet achieve favorable rate performance as compared to conventional path/time discretization schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this letter, we investigate an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled wireless powered communication network (WPCN), in which the UAV first employs the radio frequency (RF) signal to power ground users, and then the users communicate with the UAV by using the harvested energy. The sum rate maximization problem in WPCN suffers doubly near-far effect caused by the double signal propagation loss in both the energy harvesting and communication stage. It is generally believed that this effect can be alleviated by integrating UAV into WPCN, thanks to its flexible deployment. However, due to the lack of analytical solution in state-of-art research, it is still unclear how to quantify the advantage that the mobility of UAV brings to migrating the doubly near-far effect. To address this issue, by showing that the optimal UAV trajectory has a multi-location hovering structure, we first derive the closed-form optimal solution of resource allocation, as a function of the UAV hovering location for downlink wireless power transfer (WPT). We then prove that the UAV in our case only needs to hover at a single location for WPT. More importantly, it is explicitly shown that the doubly near far effect can be alleviated into near-far effect. Simulation results validate our analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous tracking of suspicious unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by legitimate monitoring UAVs (or monitors) can be crucial to public safety and security. It is non-trivial to optimize the trajectory of a monitor while conceiving its monitoring intention, due to typically non-convex propulsion and thrust power functions. This article presents a novel framework to jointly optimize the propulsion and thrust powers, as well as the 3D trajectory of a solar-powered monitor which conducts covert, video-based, UAV-on-UAV tracking and surveillance. A multi-objective problem is formulated to minimize the energy consumption of the monitor and maximize a weighted sum of distance keeping and altitude changing, which measures the disguising of the monitor. Based on the practical power models of the UAV propulsion, thrust and hovering, and the model of the harvested solar power, the problem is non-convex and intangible for existing solvers. We convexify the propulsion power by variable substitution, and linearize the solar power. With successive convex approximation, the resultant problem is then transformed with tightened constraints and efficiently solved by the proximal difference-of-convex algorithm with extrapolation in polynomial time. The proposed scheme can be also applied online. Extensive simulations corroborate the merits of the scheme, as compared to baseline schemes with partial or no disguising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter considers a solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system, where the UAV collects data from Internet of Things Devices (IoTDs) on the ground while also charging them using laser charging technology. Both the linear and nonlinear laser charging models are considered. We aim to maximize the residual energy of the UAV while satisfying the requirements of IoTDs by jointly optimizing the three-dimensional (3D) trajectory of UAV and scheduling for IoTDs. The optimization problem is formulated as a mixed integer non-convex problem which is difficult to solve in general. We apply the successive convex approximation and block coordinate descent algorithm to address this problem successfully. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our algorithm compared with two benchmark methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers secure communications for an underlay cognitive radio network (CRN) in the presence of an external eavesdropper (Eve). The secrecy performance of CRNs is usually limited by the primary receiver's interference power constraint. To overcome this issue, we propose to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a friendly jammer to interfere Eve in decoding the confidential message from the secondary transmitter. Our goal is to jointly optimize the transmit power and UAV's trajectory in the three-dimensional space to maximize the average achievable secrecy rate of the secondary system. The formulated optimization problem is nonconvex due to the non-convexity of the objective and non-convexity of constraints, which is very challenging to solve. To obtain a suboptimal but efficient solution to the design problem, we first transform it into a more tractable form and then develop an iterative algorithm for its solution by leveraging the inner approximation (IA) framework. Combining tools from IA framework and S-procedure, we further extend the proposed algorithm to a more realistic scenario, where the imperfect location information of ground nodes (including Eve, secondary receiver and primary receiver) is considered, resulting in the average worst-case secrecy rate. Extensive numerical results are provided to demonstrate the merits of the proposed algorithms over existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided millimeter Wave (mmWave) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, where a UAV serves as a flying base station (BS) to provide wireless access services to a set of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in different clusters. We aim to maximize the downlink sum rate by jointly optimizing the three-dimensional (3D) placement of the UAV, beam pattern and transmit power. To address this problem, we first transform the non-convex problem into a total path loss minimization problem, and hence the optimal 3D placement of the UAV can be achieved via standard convex optimization techniques. Then, the multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) based algorithm is presented for the shaped-beam pattern synthesis of an antenna array. Finally, by transforming the original problem into an optimal power allocation problem under the fixed 3D placement of the UAV and beam pattern, we derive the closed-form expression of transmit power based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. In addition, inspired by fraction programming (FP), we propose a FP-based suboptimal algorithm to achieve a near-optimal performance. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a significant performance gain in terms of sum rate for all IoT devices, as compared with orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided secure communication system is conceived and investigated, where the UAV transmits legitimate information to a ground user in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). To guarantee the security, the UAV employs a power splitting approach, where its transmit power can be divided into two parts for transmitting confidential messages and artificial noise (AN), respectively. We aim to maximize the average secrecy rate by jointly optimizing the UAV’s trajectory, the transmit power levels and the corresponding power splitting ratios allocated to different time slots during the whole flight time, subject to both the maximum UAV speed constraint, the total mobility energy constraint, the total transmit power constraint, and other related constraints. To efficiently tackle this non-convex optimization problem, we propose an iterative algorithm by blending the benefits of the block coordinate descent (BCD) method, the concave-convex procedure (CCCP) and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Specially, we show that the proposed algorithm exhibits very low computational complexity and each of its updating steps can be formulated in a nearly closed form. Besides, it can be easily extended to the case of three-dimensional (3D) trajectory design. Our simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless power transfer system, where a UAV is dispatched as an energy transmitter (ET), transferring radio frequency (RF) signals to a set of energy receivers (ERs) periodically. We aim to maximize the energy harvested at all ERs by jointly optimizing the UAV's three-dimensional (3D) placement, beam pattern and charging time. However, the considered optimization problem taking into account the drone flight altitude and the wireless coverage performance is formulated as a non-convex problem. To tackle this problem, we propose a low-complexity iterative algorithm to decompose the original problem into four sub-problems in order to optimize the variables sequentially. In particular, we first use the sequential unconstrained convex minimization based algorithm to find the globally optimal UAV two-dimensional (2D) position. Subsequently, we can directly obtain the optimal UAV altitude as the objective function of problem is monotonic decreasing with respect to UAV altitude. Then, we propose the multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) based algorithm to control the phase of antenna array elements, in order to achieve high steering performance of multi-beams. Finally, with the above solved variables, the original problem is reformulated as a single-variable optimization problem where charging time is the optimization variable, and can be solved using the standard convex optimization techniques. Furthermore, we use the branch and bound method to design the UAV trajectory which can be constructed as traveling salesman problem (TSP) to minimize flight distance. Numerical results validate the theoretical findings and demonstrate that significant performance gain in terms of sum received power of ERs can be achieved by the proposed algorithm in UAV-enabled wireless power transfer networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided simultaneous uplink and downlink transmission networks, where one UAV acting as a disseminator is connected to multiple access points (AP), and the other UAV acting as a base station (BS) collects data from numerous sensor nodes (SNs). The goal of this paper is to maximize the system throughput by jointly optimizing the 3D UAV trajectory, communication scheduling, and UAV-AP/SN transmit power. We first consider a special case where the UAV-BS and UAV-AP trajectories are pre-determined. Although the resulting problem is an integer and non-convex optimization problem, a globally optimal solution is obtained by applying the polyblock outer approximation (POA) method based on the problem’s hidden monotonic structure. Subsequently, for the general case considering the 3D UAV trajectory optimization, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to alternately optimize the divided sub-problems based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed design is able to achieve significant system throughput gain over the benchmarks. In addition, the SCA-based method can achieve nearly the same performance as the POA-based method with much lower computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]