Trajectory and Power Optimization for Multi-UAV Enabled Emergency Wireless Communications Networks

TL;DR

The paper tackles capacity optimization for multi-UAV emergency wireless networks by jointly optimizing UAV trajectories and transmit powers. It introduces a practical one-way hover-fly-hover trajectory and solves the resulting non-convex problem via decomposition into trajectory and power subproblems, using successive convex approximation and block-coordinate updates. Key contributions include the one-way HFH trajectory design, a proximity-based UAV–user pairing rule, and a convexification-based optimization framework implemented with CVX. Simulations demonstrate substantial capacity gains over baselines and highlight the benefits of deploying multiple UAVs for rapid emergency coverage.

Abstract

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has attracted much attention due to its flexible deployment and controllable mobility. As the general communication network cannot meet the emergency requirements, in this paper we study the multi-UAV enabled wireless emergency communication system. Our goal is to maximize the capacity with jointly optimizing trajectory and allocating power. To tackle this non-convex optimization problem, we first decompose it into two sub-problems to optimize the trajectory and power allocation, respectively. Then, we propose the successive convex approximation technique and the block coordinate update algorithm to solve the two subproblems. The approximate optimal solution can be obtained after continuous iterations. Simulation results show that the capacity can be greatly increased using our proposed joint trajectory optimization and power allocation.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: The multi-UAV enabled emergency wireless communication system.
• Figure 2: Average rate of $8$ users in different multi-UAV enabled communication system.
• Figure 3: Comparison of average rate between single UAV system and multi-UAV system.