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In this paper, we propose and study an energy-efficient trajectory optimization scheme for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted Internet of Things (IoT) networks. In such networks, a single UAV is powered by both solar energy and charging stations (CSs), resulting in sustainable communication services, while avoiding energy outage. In particular, we optimize the trajectory design of UAV by jointly considering the average data rate, the total energy consumption, and the fairness of coverage for the IoT terminals. A dynamic spatial-temporal configuration scheme is operated for terminals working in the discontinuous reception (DRX) mode. The module-free, action-confined on-policy and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) approaches are proposed and jointly applied to solve the formulated optimization problem in this paper. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy by comparing it with other dynamic benchmark algorithms. The extensive simulation results provided in this paper reveal that the proposed scheme outperforms the benchmarks in terms of data transmission, energy efficiency and adaptivity of avoiding battery depletion. By deploying the proposed trajectory scheme, the UAV is able to adapt itself according to the temporal and dynamic conditions of communication networks. [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]

Replacing base stations with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to serve the communication of ground users has attracted a lot of attention recently. In this paper, we study the joint resource allocation and UAV trajectory optimization for maximizing the total energy efficiency in UAV-based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink wireless networks with the quality of service (QoS) requirements. To handle the user scheduling problem, a heuristic algorithm based on matching and swapping theory is proposed first to allocate users that access UAV in each subperiod, then the transmit power allocation problem which considers the maximum transmit power and minimum user date rate is transformed to a convex optimization problem using logarithmic approximation. Meanwhile, the successive convex optimization is used in UAV trajectory optimization problem and a joint optimization algorithm is presented with the algorithm’s convergence and computational complexity. Finally, numerical results are provided to support the rationality of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a significant role in various 5G or Beyond-5G (B5G)-enabled Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. However, the UAV performance in an air-ground cooperative network is significantly affected by its mobility and air-to-ground (A2G) communication and computation behaviors. In this paper, a UAV-oriented computation offloading system is investigated, where the UAV desires to complete its onboard computation demands with the assistance of a ground edge-computing infrastructure, i.e., a road-side unit (RSU). The objective is to maximize the energy efficiency of the UAV. Specifically, a non-convex constrained optimal control problem is formulated to optimize the overall energy efficiency of UAV by jointly considering the coupled effects of UAV's longitudinal mobility, A2G communication, and computation dynamics. To address the coupled complexity and non-convexity of the original problem, a primal decomposition approach is developed to transform the problem into a convex subproblem and a primary problem, and then a closed-form optimal transmission power control is derived by solving the subproblem, which is dependent on mobility information. By embedding the closed-form optimal power control into the primary problem, a gradient projection-based iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain a joint optimal solution for both the longitudinal acceleration control and the power control, the feasibility and convergence of which is also theoretically proven. Extensive simulations have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of constraint satisfaction and convergence speed, and comparative results also demonstrate that it can outperform other benchmark methods in terms of global energy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled network where an energy-constrained rotary-wing UAV is employed as a mobile base station to serve multiple ground users (GUs), while the data transmission between the UAV and each GU faces security threats from both multiple external eavesdroppers (Eves) and other GUs that potentially act as internal Eves. To ensure the user fairness, we maximize the minimum average secrecy rate among all GUs via jointly optimizing the UAV’s trajectory and transmit power as well as the user scheduling, subject to the constraint on the UAV energy budget. To this end, an iterative suboptimal algorithm is proposed by leveraging the block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation techniques. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate the UAV-aided edge caching to assist terrestrial vehicular networks in delivering high-bandwidth content files. Aiming at maximizing the overall network throughput, we formulate a joint caching and trajectory optimization (JCTO) problem to make decisions on content placement, content delivery, and UAV trajectory simultaneously. As the decisions interact with each other and the UAV energy is limited, the formulated JCTO problem is intractable directly and timely. To this end, we propose a deep supervised learning scheme to enable intelligent edge for real-time decision-making in the highly dynamic vehicular networks. In specific, we first propose a clustering-based two-layered (CBTL) algorithm to solve the JCTO problem offline. With a given content placement strategy, we devise a time-based graph decomposition method to jointly optimize the content delivery and trajectory design, with which we then leverage the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to further optimize the content placement. We then design a deep supervised learning architecture of the convolutional neural network (CNN) to make fast decisions online. The network density and content request distribution with spatio-temporal dimensions are labeled as channeled images and input to the CNN-based model, and the results achieved by the CBTL algorithm are labeled as model outputs. With the CNN-based model, a function which maps the input network information to the output decision can be intelligently learnt to make timely inference and facilitate online decisions. We conduct extensive trace-driven experiments, and our results demonstrate both the efficiency of CBTL in solving the JCTO problem and the superior learning performance with the CNN-based model. [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]

In the past several years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) have been employed to provide enhanced coverage or relay service to mobile users in a scenario with limited or even no infrastructure since they can be deployed to almost everywhere and can be manipulated at anytime. This paper studies UAV as aerial base station (BS) enabled wireless communication system, where a UAV is dispatched to provide wireless communication service to a set of ground users with difference quality-of-experience (QoE) requirements. In real world, user requirements are randomly and unevenly distributed. In addition, UAV communication coverage and on-board energy are limited and system resources are also limited (e.g., transmission power, spectrum). In order to meet the QoE of all users with limited system resources and limited UAV energy, we jointly optimize user communication scheduling, UAV trajectory, transmit power and bandwidth allocation to maximize energy-efficiency and satisfy user QoE requirement. The formulated problem is mixes integer non-convex and non-concave so it is difficult to solve. In this paper, we solvevv the problem with two steps as follows. Firstly, we transform the objective function into a tractable form. Secondly, we divide the optimal problem into four sub-optimal problems, and then use a powerful iterative algorithm with the Dinkelbach and block coordinate descent to solve the optimal problem. That is to say, the user scheduling, UAV trajectory, transmission power and bandwidth allocation are alternately optimized in each iteration. Extensive simulation results present that our proposed method can obtain higher energy efficiency than that of baselines. Specifically, the energy efficiency obtained by our proposed method is 12.5% higher than the approach that only maximizes throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy consumption is one of the important design aspect for data collection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper studies data collection from a set of sensor nodes (SNs) in WSNs enabled by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We aim to minimize the maximum mission completion time among all UAVs by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory, as well as the wake-up scheduling and association for SNs, while ensuring that each SN can successfully upload the targeting amount of data with a given energy budget. The formulated problem is a non-convex problem which is difficult to be solved directly. To tackle this problem, we first propose a simple scheme that each UAV only collects data while hovering, termed as hovering mode (Hmode). For this mode, in order to find the optimized hovering locations for each SN and the serving order among all locations, we propose an efficient algorithm by leveraging the min–max multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (min–max m-TSP) and convex optimization techniques. Furthermore, we propose the more general scheme that enables continuous data collection even while flying, termed as flying mode (Fmode). By leveraging bisection method and time discretization technique, the original problem is transformed into a discretized equivalent with a finite number of optimization variables, based on which a Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) solution is obtained by applying the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. The simulation results show that the proposed multi-UAV enabled data collection with joint trajectory and communication design achieves significant performance gains over the benchmark schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosive data traffic and connections in 5G networks require the use of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to accommodate more users. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be exploited with NOMA to improve the situation further. In this paper, we propose a UAV-assisted NOMA network, in which the UAV and base station (BS) cooperate with each other to serve ground users simultaneously. The sum rate is maximized by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and the NOMA precoding. To solve the optimization, we decompose it into two steps. First, the sum rate of the UAV-served users is maximized via alternate user scheduling and UAV trajectory with its interference to the BS-served users below a threshold. Then, the optimal NOMA precoding vectors are obtained using two schemes with different constraints. The first scheme intends to cancel the interference from the BS to the UAV-served user, while the second one restricts the interference to a given threshold. In both schemes, the non-convex optimization problems are converted into tractable ones. An iterative algorithm is designed. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for the hybrid NOMA and UAV network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the physical layer security of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network, where a UAV base station (UAV-B) transmits confidential information to multiple information receivers (IRs) with the aid of a UAV jammer (UAV-J) in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. We formulate an optimization problem to jointly design the trajectories and transmit power of UAV-B and UAV-J in order to maximize the minimum average secrecy rate over all IRs. The optimization problem is non-convex and the optimization variables are coupled, which leads to the optimization problem being mathematically intractable. As such, we decompose the optimization problem into two subproblems and then solve it by employing an alternating iterative algorithm and the successive convex approximation technique. Our results show that the average secrecy rate performance of the proposed scheme provides about 20% and 150% performance gains over the joint trajectory and transmit power optimization without UAV-J scheme and the transmit power optimization with fixed trajectory scheme at flight period $T=150$  s, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless communication, where a rotary-wing UAV is dispatched to communicate with multiple ground nodes (GNs). We aim to minimize the total UAV energy consumption, including both propulsion energy and communication related energy, while satisfying the communication throughput requirement of each GN. To this end, we first derive a closed-form propulsion power consumption model for rotary-wing UAVs, and then formulate the energy minimization problem by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and communication time allocation among GNs, as well as the total mission completion time. The problem is difficult to be optimally solved, as it is non-convex and involves infinitely many variables over time. To tackle this problem, we first consider the simple fly-hover-communicate design, where the UAV successively visits a set of hovering locations and communicates with one corresponding GN while hovering at each location. For this design, we propose an efficient algorithm to optimize the hovering locations and durations, as well as the flying trajectory connecting these hovering locations, by leveraging the travelling salesman problem with neighborhood and convex optimization techniques. Next, we consider the general case, where the UAV also communicates while flying. We propose a new path discretization method to transform the original problem into a discretized equivalent with a finite number of optimization variables, for which we obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution by applying the successive convex approximation technique. The numerical results show that the proposed designs significantly outperform the benchmark schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this letter, we study a cellular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system in which one UAV jointly performs sensing tasks and data transmission to the base station. We maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the UAV by optimizing UAV sensing and transmission. To solve this non-convex problem, we decouple it into two subproblems: UAV sensing optimization and UAV transmission optimization. In the UAV sensing optimization, we design the UAV trajectory and speed with convex optimization and differential methods. In the UAV transmission optimization, the transmission power is derived by the extremum principles. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently improve the EE in the cellular UAV system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled secure communication systems where a mobile UAV wishes to send confidential messages to multiple ground users. To improve the security performance, a cooperative UAV is additionally considered that transmits the jamming signal. In this system, we maximize the minimum secrecy rate among the ground users by jointly optimizing the trajectory and the transmit power of the UAVs as well as the user scheduling. To efficiently solve this nonconvex problem, we adopt block successive upper bound minimization techniques, which address a sequence of approximated convex problems for each block of variables. Numerical results verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are anticipated to be widely deployed in future wireless communications, due to their advantages of high mobility and easy deployment. However, the broadcast nature of air-to-ground line-of-sight wireless channels brings a new challenge to the information security of UAV-ground communication. This paper tackles such a challenge in the physical layer by exploiting the mobility of UAV via its trajectory design. We consider a UAV-ground communication system with multiple potential eavesdroppers on the ground, where the information on the locations of the eavesdroppers is imperfect. We formulate an optimization problem, which maximizes the average worst case secrecy rate of the system by jointly designing the robust trajectory and transmit power of the UAV over a given flight duration. The nonconvexity of the optimization problem and the imperfect location information of the eavesdroppers make the problem difficult to be solved optimally. We propose an iterative suboptimal algorithm to solve this problem efficiently by applying the block coordinate descent method, $\mathcal {S}$ -procedure, and successive convex optimization method. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the average worst case secrecy rate significantly, as compared to two other benchmark algorithms without robust design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled secure communication system. Two UAVs are applied in this system where one UAV moves around to communicate with multiple users on the ground using orthogonal time-division multiple access while the other UAV in the area jams the eavesdroppers on the ground to protect communications of the desired users. Specifically, we maximize the minimum worst-case secrecy rate among the users within each period by jointly adjusting UAV trajectories and user scheduling under the maximum UAV speed constraints, the UAV return constraints, the UAV collision avoidance constraints, and the discrete binary constraints on user scheduling variables. Since the resulting optimization problem is very difficult to solve due to its highly nonlinear objective function and nonconvex constraints, we first equivalently transform it into a more tractable problem. In particular, the binary constraints are equivalently converted to a number of equality constraints. Then, we develop a novel joint optimization algorithm to handle the converted problem. In order to further improve the secrecy rate performance, we also extend the developed algorithm to the case with multiple jamming UAVs. The simulation results show that the proposed joint optimization algorithm achieves significantly better performance than the conventional algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]