Wireless communication systems that include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) promise to provide costeffective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms (HAPs), on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly re-configured, and are likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight (LoS) links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energyconstrained UAVs for wireless communications also introduces many new challenges. In this article, we provide an overview of UAV-aided wireless communications, by introducing the basic networking architecture and main channel characteristics, highlighting the key design considerations as well as the new opportunities to be exploited.

Wireless communication with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a promising technology for future communication systems. In this paper, we study energy-efficient UAV communication with a ground terminal via optimizing the UAV's trajectory, a new design paradigm that jointly considers both the communication throughput and the UAV's energy consumption. To this end, we first derive a theoretical model on the propulsion energy consumption of fixed-wing UAVs as a function of the UAV's flying speed, direction and acceleration, based on which the energy efficiency of UAV communication is defined. Then, for the case of unconstrained trajectory optimization, we show that both the ratemaximization and energy-minimization designs lead to vanishing energy efficiency and thus are energyinefficient in general. Next, we introduce a practical circular UAV trajectory, under which the UAV's flight radius and speed are optimized to maximize the energy efficiency for communication. Furthermore, an efficient design is proposed for maximizing the UAV's energy efficiency with general constraints on its trajectory, including its initial/final locations and velocities, as well as maximum speed and acceleration.Numerical results show that the proposed designs achieve significantly higher energy efficiency for UAV communication as compared with other benchmark schemes.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant interest recently in assisting wireless communication due to their high maneuverability, flexible deployment, and low cost. This paper considers a multi-UAV enabled wireless communication system, where multiple UAV-mounted aerial base stations (BSs) are employed to serve a group of users on the ground. To achieve fair performance among users, we maximize the minimum throughput over all ground users in the downlink communication by optimizing the multiuser communication scheduling and association jointly with the UAVs' trajectory and power control. The formulated problem is a mixed integer nonconvex optimization problem that is challenging to solve. As such, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm for solving it by applying the block coordinate descent and successive convex optimization techniques. Specifically, the user scheduling and association, UAV trajectory, and transmit power are alternately optimized in each iteration. In particular, for the non-convex UAV trajectory and transmit power optimization problems, two approximate convex optimization problems are solved, respectively. We further show that the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge. To speed up the algorithm convergence and achieve good throughput, a low-complexity and systematic initialization scheme is also proposed for the UAV trajectory design based on the simple circular trajectory and the circle packing scheme. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the significant throughput gains of the proposed design as compared to other benchmark schemes.

Polarization is one of the basic properties of electromagnetic waves conveying valuable information in signal transmission and sensitive measurements. Conventional methods for advanced polarization control impose demanding requirements on material properties and attain only limited performance. We demonstrated ultrathin, broadband, and highly efficient metamaterial-based terahertz polarization converters that are capable of rotating a linear polarization state into its orthogonal one. On the basis of these results, we created metamaterial structures capable of realizing near-perfect anomalous refraction. Our work opens new opportunities for creating high-performance photonic devices and enables emergent metamaterial functionalities for applications in the technologically difficult terahertz-frequency regime.

This paper studies unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled wireless communication, where a rotarywing UAV is dispatched to send/collect data to/from multiple ground nodes (GNs). We aim to minimize the total UAV energy consumption, including both propulsion energy and communication related energy, while satisfying the communication throughput requirement of each GN. To this end, we first derive an analytical propulsion power consumption model for rotary-wing UAVs, and then formulate the energy minimization problem by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and communication time allocation among GNs, as well as the total mission completion time. The problem is difficult to be optimally solved, as it is non-convex and involves infinitely many variables over time. To tackle this problem, we first consider the simple fly-hover-communicate design, where the UAV successively visits a set of hovering locations and communicates with one corresponding GN when hovering at each location.For this design, we propose an efficient algorithm to optimize the hovering locations and durations, as well as the flying trajectory connecting these hovering locations, by leveraging the travelling salesman problem (TSP) and convex optimization techniques. Next, we consider the general case where the UAV communicates also when flying. We propose a new path discretization method to transform the original problem into a discretized equivalent with a finite number of optimization variables, for which we obtain a locally optimal solution by applying the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique.Numerical results show the significant performance gains of the proposed designs over benchmark schemes, in achieving energy-efficient communication with rotary-wing UAVs.Wireless communication using unmanned aerial platforms is a promising technology to achieve wireless coverage in areas without or with insufficient terrestrial infrastructures. Early efforts have been primarily focusing on using high altitude platforms (HAPs), which are deployed in stratosphere at altitude around 20 km, aiming to provide ubiquitous coverage in rural or remote areas. These include the Project Loon by Google with the mission of "Balloon-powered Internet for everyone", as well as the Project Skybender by Google and the Project Aquila by Facebook, both using solar-powered drones to provide internet access from the sky. On the other hand, wireless communication using low altitude platforms (LAPs), typically below a few kilometers above the ground, has received growing interests recently. LAPs can be implemented in various ways, such as helikite [1] and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) [2]-[6]. In particular, compared to other airborne solutions such as HAPs and helikite, UAV-enabled wireless communication brings new advantages [2], such as on-demand and more swift deployment, superior link quality in the presence of shorter-distance line-of-sight (LoS) communication channel with ground nodes (GNs), and higher network flexibility with the fully controllable UAV movement in ...