Cognitive UAV Communication via Joint Trajectory and Power Control

Abstract: This paper investigates a new spectrum sharing scenario between unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and terrestrial wireless communication systems. We consider that a cognitive/secondary UAV transmitter communicates with a ground secondary receiver (SR), in the presence of a number of primary terrestrial communication links that operate over the same frequency band. We exploit the UAV's controllable mobility via trajectory design, to improve the cognitive UAV communication performance while controlling the co-channel interference at each of the primary receivers (PRs). In particular, we maximize the average achievable rate from the UAV to the SR over a finite mission/communication period by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and transmit power allocation, subject to constraints on the UAV's maximum speed, initial/final locations, and average transmit power, as well as a set of interference temperature (IT) constraints imposed at each of the PRs for protecting their communications. However, the joint trajectory and power optimization problem is non-convex and thus difficult to be solved optimally. To tackle this problem, we propose an efficient algorithm that ensures to obtain a locally optimal solution by applying the techniques of alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results show that our proposed joint UAV trajectory and power control scheme significantly enhances the achievable rate of the cognitive UAV communication system, as compared to benchmark schemes.