Sum Rate Maximization for Mobile UAV-aided Internet of Things Communications System

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication provides a promising solution to emergency recovery and coverage extension. For Internet of Things (IoT) communications system, utilizing UAV as an on-demand gateway is an efficient technique to enable the communication between IoT devices over a long distance. In this paper, we investigate a mobile UAV-aided Internet of Things (IoT) communications system, where one UAV actes as a dynamic aerial base station to serve all the IoT devices. We aim to maximize the sum rate of the mobile UAV by jointly optimizing IoT device-UAV scheduling, the uplink transmission power of the IoT devices and the UAV altitude. This optimization is a mixed-integer non-convex problem, and an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed by means of the block coordinate descent technique. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate that our proposed scheme significantly outperforms the existing one.