Abstract
This paper studies the joint trajectory and resource allocation problem
for a laser-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted data
aggregation framework. The considered system incorporates semi-passive
nodes that establish their wireless communication links with the UAV via
bistatic backscatter communications enabled by a battery-powered power
beacon source. We aim to optimize the UAV trajectory while minimizing
the laser energy consumption throughout the whole flight by tuning the
laser power and the power beacon radiated temporal power profiles.
Towards this aim, we first adopt path discretization to approximate the
optimal control problem of interest into a non-linear programming one
whilst accounting for the UAV dynamics constraints and available power
budget restrictions. Then, we solve the problem by successive convex
approximation (SCA) over the joint set of variables and determine the
problem feasibility by a data collection maximization problem. Moreover,
we propose a low-complexity solution for the feasibility problem.
Finally, the conducted simulations show that the proposed algorithm
provides 50% collected data increase and almost 50% laser energy
reduction under different operation conditions such as laser station
position, maximum laser output power, start and end points of the
trajectory, power beacon battery capacity, and the permissible flight
length.