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The explosive computation demands in the Internet of Things (IoT) have triggered the research interests on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted mobile-edge computing (MEC) systems even though there are still many challenges, such as computing delay requirement, multi-UAV cooperation, and resource management. This letter focuses on the computing delay issue in MEC systems assisted by multiple UAVs with the goal of task completion time minimization. In particular, both the partial offloading and binary offloading modes are considered by jointly optimizing time slot size, terminal devices scheduling, computation resource allocation, and UAVs’ trajectories. Particularly, an non-LoS channel model is adopted for UAV-ground communication. To handle the formulated problems, we develop alternating optimization algorithms by invoking the successive convex approximation method, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions and penalized method. Numerical results show that the completion time is significantly decreased by the proposed algorithms. [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]

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]

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as communication platforms is of great significance in future wireless networks, especially for on-demand deployment in temporary events and emergency situations. Although prior works have shown the performance improvement by exploiting the UAV’s mobility, they mainly focus on delay-tolerant applications. As delay requirements fundamentally limit the UAV’s mobility, it remains unknown whether the UAV is able to provide any performance gain in delay-constrained communication scenarios. Motivated by the above, we study, in this paper, an UAV-enabled orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) network where an UAV is dispatched as the mobile base station (BS) to serve a group of users on the ground. We consider a minimum-rate ratio (MRR) for each user, defined as the minimum instantaneous rate required over the average achievable throughput, to flexibly adjust the percentage of its delay-constrained data traffic. Under a given set of constraints on the users’ MRRs, we aim to maximize the minimum average throughput of all users by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and OFDMA resource allocation. First, we show that the max–min throughput in general decreases as the users’ MRRs become larger, which reveals a fundamental throughput-delay tradeoff in UAV-enabled communications. Next, we propose an iterative parameter-assisted block coordinate descent method to optimize the UAV trajectory and OFDMA resource allocation alternately, by applying the successive convex optimization and the Lagrange duality, respectively. Furthermore, an efficient and systematic UAV trajectory initialization scheme is proposed based on the simple circular trajectory. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a novel mobile relaying technique, where the relay nodes are mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and hence are capable of moving at high speed. Compared with conventional static relaying, mobile relaying offers a new degree of freedom for performance enhancement via careful relay trajectory design. We study the throughput maximization problem in mobile relaying systems by optimizing the source/relay transmit power along with the relay trajectory, subject to practical mobility constraints (on the UAV’s speed and initial/final relay locations), as well as the information-causality constraint at the relay. It is shown that for the fixed relay trajectory, the throughput-optimal source/relay power allocations over time follow a “staircase” water filling structure, with non-increasing and non-decreasing water levels at the source and relay, respectively. On the other hand, with given power allocations, the throughput can be further improved by optimizing the UAV’s trajectory via successive convex optimization. An iterative algorithm is thus proposed to optimize the power allocations and relay trajectory alternately. Furthermore, for the special case with free initial and final relay locations, the jointly optimal power allocation and relay trajectory are derived. Numerical results show that by optimizing the trajectory of the relay and power allocations adaptive to its induced channel variation, mobile relaying is able to achieve significant throughput gains over the conventional static relaying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]