An Energy Efficient Cooperation Design for Multi-UAVs Enabled Wireless Powered Communication Networks

Abstract

This paper studies a multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) -enabled wireless powered communication network (WPCN). We present a novel use of UAVs with energy harvesting module. Thus, UAVs are used as flying base stations to collecting data and charging ground IoT devices via radio frequency (RF). Due to energy constraint and limited coverage of single UAV, its applications are limited. So we investigate a Multi-UAVs solution to enhance system transmitting performance via UAVs cooperation. In particular, we focus on finding a tradeoff solution to prolong devices lifetime and improve the average uplink throughput efficiency among all ground users in a given time. To tackle this problem, we first consider a relaxed problem in which IoT devices are distributed in different residential blocks. A Work-Gain algorithm is designed for the relaxed problem. The performances comparison are presented in numerical results. Our performance analysis and simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed approach can improve the uplink performance approximately by 20% compared to other methods in certain circumstances.