Resource and trajectory optimization in UAV-powered wireless communication system

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a promising enabler of Internet of Things (IoT) owing to its highly flexible features. Combined with wireless power transfer (WPT) techniques, a UAV can provide energy for IoT nodes, which can extend the lifetime of energy constrained communication systems. This paper studies resource and trajectory optimization in UAV-powered wireless communication systems, which consists of two UAVs and two ground nodes (GNs). The system works in a way that the two UAVs alternately charge the two GNs through wireless power transfer and two GNs also alternately send their information to the corresponding UAV with the harvested energy, which can effectively reduce the interference while receiving the information of GNs. Aiming to maximize the minimum throughput of two GNs, wireless resource and UAVs’ trajectories are jointly optimized with the constraints of UAV collision avoidance, flying speed, and transmit power. Successive convex programming (SCP) and block coordinate descent (BCD) are utilized to solve the optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves larger minimum throughput than the benchmark scheme.