Throughput Maximization in Multi-UAV Enabled Communication Systems with Difference Consideration

Abstract

This paper investigates a UAV-enabled wireless communication system with multiple UAVs (multi-UAVs), where the UAVs are dispatched to collect information from a group of ground terminals (GTs) that are energy-constrained. In particular, we consider that UAVs may differ so that each UAV can be individually designed. Besides, for the sake of collision avoidance of these multi-UAVs, an effective security flight mechanism is designed. To achieve a fair performance between GTs, this paper aims to maximize the minimum GT throughput by jointly optimizing the communication scheduling, power allocation, and UAVs' trajectories. However, the formulated problem is shown to be a mixed integer non-convex optimization problem that is hard to solve. To tackle this problem, we first decompose it into two subproblems, and then, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed by applying the block coordinate descent, relaxation, as well as successive convex optimization techniques. The proposed algorithm can be effectively utilized in wireless communication and networks. Moreover, a benchmark is set for the purpose of illustrating the superiority of the proposed design. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed design achieves a significant performance gain as compared with the benchmark. © 2013 IEEE.