Power-Efficient Communication in UAV-Aided Wireless Sensor Networks

This letter investigates a power-efficient unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based wireless sensor network, where the UAV is used as a flying base station to communicate with the sensor nodes (SNs) with flexible movement path. We aim at minimizing the total power consumption of the UAV with a guarantee of the required transmission rate of SNs by jointly optimizing the SNs-UAV scheduling scheme, power allocation strategy, and flight trajectory of the UAV. Due to the nonconvex and mixed-integer nature of the original problem, block coordinate decent and successive convex optimization techniques are employed to decompose it into two sub-problems, which leads to an efficient iterative algorithm. Numerical results show the performance gain of our proposed scheme.