Energy Efficient UAV Trajectory Design for Hovering-Flying Data Collection

In this paper, we consider a UAV-aided data collection network where the UAV provides communication service for sensor nodes (SNs) which are distributed randomly on the ground with hovering-flying mode. We aim at minimizing the total energy consumption for the UAV to collect data from SNs, including both hovering energy and flying energy, by jointly optimizing the number of hovering points and the UAV trajectory. We use block coordinate decent (BCD) and successive convex optimization (SCO) techniques by decomposing it into two sub-problems to solve the original non-convex problem, which are alternately solved until the algorithm converges. Numerical results show that the proposed solution saves the consumed energy effectively.