Energy Minimization for Rotary-Wing UAV Enabled WPCN

In this paper, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled wireless-powered communication network (WPCN), where a rotary-wing UAV is employed as a hybrid access point (AP) to serve multiple ground users (GUs). Specifically, the GUs harvest radio frequency (RF) energy from the signal sent by the UAV, which is then used by the GUs to power their uplink information transmission to the UAV. We aim to minimize the energy consumption of the UAV while scarifying the communication requirement of each GUs. The UAV trajectory, user scheduling as well as time allocation need be jointly optimized. Because of the nonconvexity of the problem, we propose an algorithm to obtain a locally optimal solution based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique for the proposed path discretization design. Finally, simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our study.