Energy Minimization for UAV-Enabled Wireless Power Transfer and Relay Networks

In this article, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless power transfer (WPT) and relay communication network consisting of a base station (BS), a UAV, and multiple ground users. The UAV acts as both a wireless power transmission source and an uplink communication relay. Specifically, an entire transmission period of the considered system is divided into two stages. In the first stage, the UAV transfers the power to the ground users along a well-optimized flight trajectory and meanwhile, the users transmit data to the UAV using the harvested energy. Subsequently, in the second stage, the UAV flies to the vicinity of the BS and forwards the data to the BS. For the purpose of minimizing the energy consumed by the UAV, we jointly optimize the time durations of the two stages, the UAV’s transmit powers for WPT and data forwarding, as well as its flight trajectory, subject to the constraints of the Quality of Service (QoS), the information forwarding, the energy causality, and the mobility of the UAV. The involved optimization problem is nonconvex and highly intractable. To this end, we propose an efficient alternating algorithm to iteratively solve the two subproblems with respect to the time durations of the two stages and the UAV’s transmit powers and trajectory, respectively. The first subproblem has a closed-form optimal solution and the second subproblem is handled by addressing a surrogate convex problem based on the technique of successive convex approximation. Finally, the simulation results confirm the superiority of our proposed algorithm.