Trajectory Design in Rechargeable UAV Aided Wireless Networks: A Unified Framework for Energy Efficiency and Flight Time Minimization

Abstract: This paper studies a rechargeable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted wireless network, where a UAV is dispatched to disseminate information to a group of ground terminals (GTs) and returns to a recharging station (RS) before the on-board battery is depleted. The central aim is to design a UAV trajectory with the minimum total time duration, including the flight and recharging time, by optimizing the flying velocity, transmit power and hovering positions jointly. A flow-based mathematical programming formulation is proposed to provide optimal for joint optimization of flying and recharging time. Furthermore, to attack the curse of dimensionality for optimal decision making, a two-step method is proposed. In the first step, the UAV hovering positions is fixed and initialize a feasible trajectory design by solving a travelling salesman problem with energy constraints (TSPE) problem. In the second step, for the given initial trajectory, the time consumption for each sub-tour is minimized by optimizing the flying velocity, transmit power and hovering positions jointly. Numerical results show that the proposed method outperforms state of art techniques and reduces the aggregate time duration in an efficient way.