A Joint Trajectory and Energy Harvesting Method for an UAV Enabled Disaster Response Network

Abstract

Mobile communication aided by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be a promising approach to address tremendous challenges in future communication networks, particularly in disaster response networks (DRNs). In this paper, an energy-efficient uplink communication between terrestrial users and a UAV as flying base station (BS) is studied, a novel plan that simultaneously optimizes the UAV trajectory and considers limited energy of the UAV. To this end, at the first step, a analytical model of energy consumption of the UAV is defined to calculate the energy that the UAV spends for each user. Following that, an energy harvesting (EH) technique is applied to harvest energy from uplink users' signals at the UAV. Then, by defining the signal-interference-noise-ratio (SINR) of uplink communications, the energy efficiency (EE) and amount of harvested energy are calculated. Finally, inspired by travelling salesperson problem (TSP), the problem of optimizing the path of the UAV is defined and solved. Furthermore, the proposed optimization approach considers the fact that the UAV has limited energy and it must serve all users. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency of proposed plans, which achieve an optimized trajectory for the UAV and an efficient uplink communication for cellular users