UAV-enabled wireless power transfer with base station charging and UAV power consumption

Wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising charging technology for battery-limited sensors. In this paper, we study the use of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a charger for WPT. Unlike the previous works, our study takes into account the power consumption of the UAV (power consumption during hovering and flight), the charging process from a base station (BS) to the UAV and the conversion loss of the energy harvester. Both one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) WPT systems are considered. The sum-energy received by all sensors is maximized to find the optimal strategy for UAV deployment. Two different charging schemes are proposed. Numerical results show that the sum-energy received by all sensors is determined by sensors' topology, the flight speed of the UAV and the transmit power. They also show that, when the BS charging process and the UAV power consumption are considered in the optimization, the optimal location of the UAV in the 1D and 2D WPT systems is closer to the BS than in the previous works that ignore these two practical factors

Analysis of energy transfer efficiency in UAV-enabled wireless networks

Wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising charging technology for battery-limited sensors. In this paper, we study the energy transfer in a wireless network using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Instead of charging the remote wireless sensors directly from the access point (AP), we study the schemes of using a UAV to charge the remote wireless sensors after it is charged by the AP. To this end, two schemes are proposed. The performances of these two schemes are examined and compared with the conventional scheme without using a UAV. A distance threshold beyond which the new schemes have superiority over the conventional scheme is derived by solving energy equations. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes can achieve significantly higher energy efficiency than the conventional scheme when the transmission distance is within the derived critical range

Energy Efficiency Optimization for D2D Communications Underlaying UAV-assisted Industrial IoT Networks with SWIPT

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been viewed as a typical application for the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks. This paper investigates the energy efficiency (EE) optimization problem for the device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-assisted IIoT networks with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). We aim to maximize the EE of the system while satisfying the constraints of transmission rate and transmission power budget. However, the designed EE optimization problem is non-convex involving joint optimization of the UAV’s location, beam pattern, power control and time scheduling, which is difficult to tackle directly. To solve this problem, we present a joint UAV location and resource allocation algorithm to decouple the original problem into several sub-problems and solve them sequentially. Specifically, we first apply the Dinkelbach method to transform the fraction problem to a subtractive-form one, and propose a mulitiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) based algorithm to optimize the beam pattern. We then optimize UAV’s location and power control using the successive convex optimization techniques. Finally, after solving the above variables, the original problem can be transformed into a single-variable problem with respect to the charging time, which is linear and can be tackled directly. Numerical results verify that significant EE gain can be obtained by our proposed algorithm as compared to the benchmark schemes