NOMA-Aided UAV Data Collection System: Trajectory Optimization and Communication Design

Wireless communication is an essential technology to unlock the full potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in numerous applications and has thus received unprecedented attention recently. Although technologies such as direct link, WiFi, and satellite communications are still useful in some remote scenarios where cellular services are unavailable, it is believed that exploiting the thriving 5G and beyond cellular networks to support UAV communications is the most promising and cost-effective approach, especially when the number of UAVs grows dramatically. On the one hand, to guarantee safe and efficient flight operations of multiple UAVs, it is of paramount importance to provide secure and ultra-reliable communication links between the UAVs and their ground pilots or control stations for conveying command and control signals, especially in beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) scenarios. On the other hand, because of advances in communication equipment miniaturization as well as UAV manufacturing, mounting compact and lightweight base stations (BSs) or relays on UAVs becomes increasingly feasible. This has led to two promising research paradigms for UAV communications, namely, UAV-assisted cellular communications and cellular-connected UAVs, where UAVs are integrated into cellular networks as aerial communication platforms and aerial users, respectively. As such, integrating UAVs into cellular networks is believed to be a win-win technology for both UAV-related industries and cellular network operators, which not only creates plenty of new business opportunities but also benefits the communication performance of 3-D wireless networks. In addition, UAV related sensing and computing are also helpful for achieving efficient and reliable communication (e.g., in avoiding coverage holes) as well as smart UAV coordination, positioning, and trajectory design. However, 5G and beyond wireless networks with UAVs significantly differs from traditional communication systems, because of the high altitude and high maneuverability of UAVs, the unique UAV-ground channels, the diversified quality of service (QoS) requirements for downlink command and control (C&C) and uplink mission-related data transmission, the stringent constraints imposed by the size, weight, and power (SWAP) limitations of UAVs, as well as the new design degrees of freedom enabled by joint UAV mobility control and communication resource allocation.

In this paper, the advantages of joint detection (JD) in a hybrid-duplex unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system (HBD-UCS) are investigated as a step toward addressing spectrum scarcity in UAV communications. Through extensive outage probability and finite signal-to-noise-ratio diversity gain analysis, we showed that the performance of JD is independent of the strength and the data rate of the inter-UAV interference signal. On the contrary, the successive interference cancellation (SIC) detector requires the data rate of the interfering UAV to be less than the ground station before meaningful performance can be seen. At the system level, it is observed that the half-duplex UAV communication system outperforms the HBD-UCS with JD at moderate and high SNR regimes, as the latter is constrained by self-interference at the full-duplex ground station. Finally, we investigated the multiplexing gain region and showed that the joint detector offers higher diversity gain over a wide range of multiplexing gains over the interference ignorant and the SIC detector.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication has become a prominent technology that can effectively assist in IoT systems. The inherent features of UAV such as mobility, flexibility, and fast deployment make it preferable for emergency Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this paper, we consider a multi-UAV assisted wireless network to support uplink communication for IoT devices distributed over a disaster area. The network involves two types of UAVs: sector UAV (SU) and anchor UAV (AU). The SU hovers at a fixed height over the sector around the temporary base station (TBS), collects the information from the respective IoT devices and relays them to the TBS via AU. The AU revolves continuously around the TBS and relays the information between the SUs and TBS periodically. We aim to improve the uplink capacity of the system. To achieve this, we employ non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), where we jointly optimize the positions of SUs and the power control of IoT devices. We propose a two-step approach to solve this. First, we optimize the position of SU in each sector by minimizing the sum distances of SU from the respective IoT devices. Then, by considering the optimal SU location, we optimize the transmit power of IoT devices using Lagrange dual method. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the system capacity by 22% compared to the state-of-the-art schemes.

Due to flexible scheduling, and better transmission channel, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can improve transmit performance of Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we propose an UAV-enabled multichannel IoT based on intelligent fog computing, where UAV as a relay forwards IoT's information to the data center under the control of fog computing base station in the case of terrestrial channel fading. The IoT's throughput are maximized by jointly optimizing subcarrier, power of IoT, and UAV, and UAV trajectory, subject to the constraints of information causality, maximum transmit power, and maximum UAV speed. The subcarriers are dynamically allocated according to their channel gains, the water filling algorithm is adopted to optimize the power for UAV, and IoT by fixing UAV trajectory, and the optimal UAV trajectory is achieved with successive convex approximation under the fixed power allocation. Then a jointly iterative optimization on subcarrier, power, and trajectory is presented to get the optimal solution. In addition, we propose a fairness optimization scheme to maximize the minimum transmit rate of IoT nodes. The simulations indicate the IoT with mobile UAV, and dynamic subcarrier allocation may achieve better transmit performance, and the fairness optimization can decrease the rate difference of nodes effectively.

In this paper, we propose a novel trajectory design for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication systems, where a single UAV moves along with multiple mobile terres-trial users to provide communication services, in the presence of malicious jamming. In our proposed design, we take the users' mobility and the jammer's adaptive jamming power into consideration and model the UAV's trajectory as a Markov decision process. Then, with the goal of optimizing the overall average throughput in our system, we design a twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient-based algorithm to judiciously optimize the trajectory of the UAV in a continuous manner, while simultaneously satisfying practical constraints on both the UAV's and users' mobility. We compare the performance of our proposed design with various baselines and show how it can improve the average throughput performance in the presence of malicious jamming and converge at a faster rate.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly, for an expanding variety of applications. These UAVs range in size from a few centimeters to the size of passenger jet aircraft, and will fly a large assortment of missions that take them from the stratosphere to residential neighborhoods. Control and communications must hence be extremely reliable. In this paper we summarize some key characteristics of UAV communications, describe fundamentals and challenges for reliable UAV communications, some current efforts in the area, and provide a framework for analysis and modeling of a vital component in any UAV communication system: the air-ground channel. Features of this channel are discussed, with example references to the literature. Suggestions for future work in air-ground channel modeling are provided. The conference presentation of this work will include example results.

In this paper, an active reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS)-assisted Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system is constructed, and a joint optimization method for UAV trajectory and system energy efficiency is proposed. In this optimization problem, firstly, the optimization problem of the phase shift matrix of the active RIS is solved by using the successive convex approximation algorithm. The transmit power optimization problem is solved by using the improved gradient descent method; Secondly, the communication energy efficiency is taken as the cost function, and the UAV trajectory is optimized by using the improved particle swarm optimization algorithm. Simulation results show that our algorithm is feasible for improving communication energy efficiency and UAV path planning.

Federated learning (FL) is considered a promising machine learning technique that has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Instead of centralizing data in one location for training a global model, FL allows the model training to occur on user devices, such as smartphones, IoT devices, or local servers, thereby respecting data privacy and security. However, implementing FL in wireless communication faces a significant challenge due to the inherent unpredictability and constant fluctuations in channel characteristics. A key challenge in implementing FL over wireless communication lies in optimizing energy efficiency. This holds significant importance, especially considering user devices with restricted power resources. On the other hand, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies present a cost-effective solution owing to flexibility and mobility compared to terrestrial base stations. Consequently, the deployment of UAV communication in FL is viewed as a potential approach to deal with the energy efficiency challenge. In this paper, we address the problem of minimizing the total energy consumption of all user equipment (UE) during the training phase of FL over a UAV communication network. Our proposed system facilitates UE to operate concurrently at the same time and frequency, thereby improving bandwidth utilization efficiently. In this paper, we address the problem of minimizing the total energy consumption during the training phase of FL over a UAV communication network. To deal with the proposed nonconvex problem, we propose a novel alternating optimization approach by dividing the problem into two suboptimal problems. We then develop iterative algorithms based on the inner approximation method, yielding at least one locally optimal solution. The numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm in solving the proposed problem compared to other benchmark algorithms, particularly in determining the optimal trajectory of the UAVs. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate how different parameter settings affect performance after implementing the proposed optimization approaches for deploying FL within the UAV communication system. These analyses yield valuable insights into the comparative effectiveness of the proposed optimization algorithms concerning overall energy consumption reduction.

In this paper, we study the trajectory and resource allocation design for downlink energy-efficient secure unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication systems, where an information UAV assisted by a multi-antenna jammer UAV serves multiple ground users in the existence of multiple ground eavesdroppers. The resource allocation strategy and the trajectory of the information UAV, and the jamming policy of the jammer UAV are jointly optimized for maximizing the system energy efficiency. The joint design is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem taking into account the quality of service (QoS) requirement, the security constraint, and the imperfect channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdroppers. The formulated problem is generally intractable. As a compromise approach, the problem is divided into two subproblems which facilitates the design of a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm based on alternating optimization approach. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed algorithm converges within a small number of iterations and demonstrate some interesting insights: (1) the introduction of a jammer UAV facilitates a highly flexible trajectory design of the information UAV which is critical to improving the system energy efficiency; (2) by exploiting the spatial degrees of freedom brought by the multi-antenna jammer UAV, our proposed design can focus the artificial noise on eavesdroppers offering a strong security mean to the system.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication is recognized as a promising technology in next generation wireless communication system. As air-to-ground (A2G) communication is vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks by malicious ground adversaries, UAV communication systems face severe security challenges. This paper investigates the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) maximization problem for UAV enabled communication systems. We aim to minimize energy consumptions required for secure communication via jointly optimizing scheduling, power allocation and UAV trajectory over a certain period of time. However, The formulated problem is non-convex and difficult to solve. To make the problem more tractable, we decompose it into three subproblems and propose an efficient iterative algorithm to obtain an appropriate solution. Simulation results show that compared with the benchmark schemes, our proposed method significantly improves the secrecy energy efficiency of UAV communication systems.

Traditional wireless security focuses on preventing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications from suspicious eavesdropping and/or jamming attacks. However, there is a growing need for governments to keep malicious UAV communications under legitimate surveillance. This paper first investigates a new surveillance paradigm for monitoring suspicious UAV communications via jamming suspicious UAVs. Due to the power consumption limitation, the choice of eavesdropping and jamming will reflect the performance of the UAVs communication. Therefore, the paper analyses the UAV’s eavesdropping and jamming models in different cases, and then proposes the model to optimize the data package in the constraints of lower power consumption, which can be solved by the proposed selection policy. The simulation results validate our proposed selection policy in terms of power consumption and eavesdropped packets. In different fading models, power consumption increases with time, regardless of distances, and our proposed policy performs better in Weibull fading channels in terms of eavesdropped packets.

Resource allocation in RISs-assisted UAV-enabled MEC network with computation capacity improvement

With the rapid development of mobile edge computing (MEC) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication networks, UAV-assisted edge computing has emerged as a promising paradigm for low-latency and energy-efficient computation. However, the time-varying nature of air-to-ground channels and the coupling between UAV trajectories and computation offloading decisions significantly increase system complexity. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an Adaptive UAV Edge Intelligence Framework (AUEIF) for joint UAV computation offloading and trajectory optimization under dynamic channels. Specifically, a dynamic graph-based system model is constructed to characterize the spatio-temporal correlation between UAV motion and channel variations. A hierarchical reinforcement learning-based optimization framework is developed, in which a high-level actor–critic module is responsible for generating coarse-grained UAV flight trajectories, while a low-level deep Q-network performs fine-grained optimization of task offloading ratios and computational resource allocation in real time. In addition, an adaptive channel prediction module leveraging long short-term memory (LSTM) networks is integrated to model temporal channel state transitions and to assist policy learning and updates. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AUEIF achieves significant improvements in end-to-end latency, energy efficiency, and overall system stability compared with conventional deep reinforcement learning approaches and heuristic-based schemes while exhibiting strong robustness against dynamic and fluctuating wireless channel conditions.

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications have drawn significant research interests. Meanwhile, cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is proposed as a promising technology to achieve the ultimate performance limits. In this paper, we investigate the UAV communication with wireless power transfer (WPT) aided CF massive MIMO systems, where the harvested energy (HE) from the downlink WPT is used to support both uplink data and pilot transmission. Take hardware impairments of UAV into account, novel closed-form downlink HE and uplink spectral efficiency (SE) expressions are derived. UAV communications with small cell (SC) and cellular massive MIMO enabled WPT systems are also considered for comparison. Our results reveal that CF massive MIMO achieves two and four times higher 95%-likely uplink SE than the ones of SC and cellular massive MIMO, respectively. To this end, SE is a concave function of the time-splitting fraction, and the optimal time-splitting fraction for maximizing SE is determined by the altitude and hardware impairment factor of the UAV.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication is regarded as a promising technology for lightweight Internet of Things (IoT) communications in narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) systems deployed in rugged terrain. In such UAV-assisted NB-IoT systems, the optimal UAV placement and resource allocation play a critical role. Consequently, the joint optimization of the UAV placement and resource allocation is considered in this study to improve the system capacity. Because the considered optimization problem is an NP-hard problem and owing to its non-convex property, it is difficult to optimize both the UAV placement and resource allocation simultaneously. Therefore, a competitive clustering algorithm has been developed by exchanging strategies between the UAV and the adjacent IoT devices to optimize the UAV placement. With multiple iterations, the UAV and the IoT devices within the coverage area of the UAV, converge their clustering strategies, which are suboptimal, to satisfy both sides. The bordering IoT devices of the adjacent clusters are then migrated heuristically toward each other to obtain the optimal system capacity maximization. Finally, the transmission throughput is optimized using the Nash equilibrium. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithms proposed in this study exhibit rapid convergence, within 10 iterations, even in a large environment. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme improves the system capacity of the existing schemes by approximately 28%.