On energy conservation for fixed-wing UAV assisted practical full-duplex relaying with service requirement and bank angle limit

Abstract

This paper studies a full-duplex (FD) amplify-and-forward relaying, where a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is dispatched as a mobile relay to serve a source-destination communication pair so as to satisfy their service requirement. Here, the UAV relay flies in a circular path and hence it must continuously change its heading of flight which leads to a bank angle of the aircraft. In order to ensure flight safety, therefore, a bank angle limit is imposed on the UAV relay. By considering a practical FD relaying, namely, there exists both residual loop interference (RLI) and processing time-delay at the relay side, novel signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) received at the destination is analyzed, giving a closed-form expression in addition to a concise lower-bound. Armed with the SINR analysis, the size of data received by the destination during a period of flight time of the UAV is calculated, leading to a closed-form lower-bound of the size of data. Taking bank angle limit into consideration and using the calculated lower-bound of the size of data, an optimization problem with the purpose of energy conservation is solved, leading to a novel method for joint adjustment of the UAV's flight parameters. Computer simulation experiments are conducted, and the results demonstrated that the proposed optimization method performs better in terms of energy conservation compared to the benchmark techniques regardless of the value of RLI and/or the service requirement of the source-destination communication pair.