UAV-Based and Energy-Constrained Data Collection System with Trajectory, Time, and Collection Scheduling Optimization

Our paper considers a scenario where an UAV collects data from multiple ground nodes (GNs). The UAV flying energy consumption and the data transmit energy consumption of GNs are regarded as a whole constraint. Through jointly optimizing the data collection scheduling, UAV trajectory, data collection time and data transmit power of GNs, we propose an optimization problem to maximize the minimum amount of data collected from GNs, which improves the fairness of data collected from each GN and reduce data collection time corresponding to the obtained trajectory. Because the formulated problem is non-convex, we first break it down into several subproblems, and then an iterative optimization algorithm is proposed to deal with the above problems through applying successive convex approximation (SCA) technique and block coordinate descent (BCD) method. Simulations show that the optimization algorithm accomplishes the above goal vary well.