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Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless power transfer (WPT) is a viable solution to remotely charge several energy receivers (ERs) in areas with intermittent access to a source of energy. However, given the limited available energy in the on-board battery of the UAV, which is mainly required to suffice propulsion energy consumption, the UAV struggles to roam seamlessly for long intervals. A key challenge is thus to efficiently use the limited battery energy, and accordingly prolong the UAV’s endurance, via controlling the underlying associated parameters such as cruising velocity. To further extend the battery lifetime, the UAV can also harness other sources of sustainable energy, such as sunlight, via solar energy harvesting. This paper studies a UAV-enabled WPT system, where a rotary-wing UAV transfers radio frequency (RF) wireless energy to several ERs at known locations. To offer uninterrupted seamless service, the UAV also harvests solar energy using solar panels. Considering the propulsion energy consumption of the UAV, we maximize the minimum average power received among all ERs over a finite cycle duration by jointly optimizing the UAV’s time allocation between harvesting and charging, flight trajectory as well as velocity, and transmit power allocation. Due to the non-convexity of the problem, we utilize the block coordinate descent (BCD) and successive convex approximation (SCA) methods. Numerical results show that the proposed solution outperforms benchmark 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]

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 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]