Optimizing the trajectory of drones: trade-off between distance and energy

The use of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones has emerged to efficiently collect data from mobile sensors when there is no infrastructure available. The drones can form a flying ad-hoc network through which the sensors can send their data to a base station at any time. In this paper, we present a mixed integer linear program to find the drones’ optimal trajectories to form and maintain this network through time while minimizing their movements and energy consumption. Furthermore we analyze the trade-off between distance and energy, where increasing the drones’ mobility can reduce their energy consumption, and derive a fair trade-off optimal solution to balance the two opposite objectives.