This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless powered communication network (WPCN), in which a UAV is dispatched as a mobile access point (AP) to serve a set of ground users periodically. The UAV employs the radio frequency (RF) wireless power transfer (WPT) to charge the users in the downlink, and the users use the harvested RF energy to send independent information to the UAV in the uplink. Unlike the conventional WPCN with fixed APs, the UAV-enabled WPCN can exploit the mobility of the UAV via trajectory design, jointly with the wireless resource allocation optimization, to maximize the system throughput. In particular, we aim to maximize the uplink common (minimum) throughput among all ground users over a finite UAV's flight period, subject to its maximum speed constraint and the users' energy neutrality constraints. The resulted problem is non-convex and thus difficult to be solved optimally. To tackle this challenge, we first consider an ideal case without the UAV's maximum speed constraint, and obtain the optimal solution to the relaxed problem. The optimal solution shows that the UAV should successively hover above a finite number of ground locations for downlink WPT, as well as above each of the ground users for uplink communication. Next, we consider the general problem with the UAV's maximum speed constraint. Based on the above multi-location-hovering solution, we first propose an efficient successive hover-and-fly trajectory design, jointly with the downlink and uplink wireless resource allocation, and then propose a locally optimal solution by applying the techniques of alternating optimization and successive convex programming (SCP). Numerical results show that the proposed UAV-enabled WPCN achieves significant throughput gains over the conventional WPCN with fixed-location AP.Index Terms-Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), wireless powered communication network (WPCN), wireless power transfer (WPT), trajectory optimization, resource allocation.
This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled two-user interference channel for wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs), in which two UAVs wirelessly charge two lowpower Internet-of-things (IoT)-devices on the ground and collect information from them. We consider two scenarios when both UAVs cooperate in energy transmission and/or information reception via interference coordination and coordinated multi-point (CoMP), respectively. For both scenarios, the UAVs' controllable mobility is exploited via trajectory design to not only enhance the wireless power transfer (WPT) efficiency in the downlink, but also mitigate the co-channel interference for wireless information transfer (WIT) in the uplink. In particular, the objective is to maximize the uplink common (minimum) throughput of the two IoT-devices over a finite UAV mission period, by jointly optimizing the trajectories of both UAVs and the downlink/uplink wireless resource allocation, subject to the maximum flying speed and collision avoidance constraints at UAVs, as well as the individual energy neutrality constraints at IoT-devices. Under both scenarios of interference coordination and CoMP, we first obtain the optimal solutions to the two common-rate maximization problems in well structures for the special case with sufficiently long UAV mission duration. Next, we obtain high-quality solutions for the practical case with finite UAV mission duration by using the alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA).Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), wireless powered communication networks (WPCN), wireless power transfer (WPT), coordinated multi-point (CoMP), trajectory optimization, resource allocation.
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