Energy-Efficiency for Fixed-Wing UAV-Enabled Data Collection and Forwarding

Abstract

Wireless communication with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) becomes a hot topic because of thier mobility and low cost. This paper proposes a fixed-wing UAV-enabled communication system to collect and forward data from one node to another node, between which the direct link is blocked. As fixed-wing UAV cannot hover steadily and turn around quickly, this paper proposes a running track (RT) trajectory model which consists of straight part and circular part. The objective is to minimize the UAV's propulsion energy consumption while satisfying the throughput requirement by optimizing the RT trajectory. A variable discretization method is used to transform the problem into a discretized equivalent. And then the problem is transformed into a convex optimization problem which can obtain a locally optimal solution by the successive convex approximation (SCA) method. Numerical results show that the proposed RT model can obtain the optimal trajectory to collect and forward the data efficiently with the less propulsion energy, compared to the approximate straight trajectory and circular trajectory.