Spectrum and energy efficiency maximization in UAV-enabled mobile relaying

Abstract

Wireless communication by leveraging the use of low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has received significant interests recently due to its low-cost and flexibility in providing wireless connectivity in areas without infrastructure coverage. This paper studies a UAV-enabled mobile relaying system, where a high-mobility UAV is deployed to assist in the information transmission from a ground source to a ground destination with their direct link blocked. By assuming that the UAV adopts the energy-efficient circular trajectory and employs time-division duplexing (TDD) based decode-and-forward (DF) relaying, we maximize the spectrum efficiency (SE) in bits/second/Hz as well as energy efficiency (EE) in bits/Joule of the considered system by jointly optimizing the time allocations for the UAV's relaying together with its flying speed and trajectory. It is revealed that for UAV-enabled mobile relaying with the UAV propulsion energy consumption taken into account, there exists a trade-off between the maximum achievable SE and EE by exploiting the new degree of freedom of UAV trajectory design.