A Landing Spot Approach for Enhancing the Performance of UAV-Aided Wireless Networks

UAV-aided wireless networks allow ultra-flexible deployment of wireless resources when and where it matters. Despite their promise, such networks are severely hindered by the limited on-board battery budget. This paper introduces a novel yet simple approach to circumvent this problem, based on the concept of so-called landing spots (LSs). LSs allow to trade-off throughput for rest time. We also derive a dynamic program which optimally exploits any given LS setup for UAV trajectory design. Our study shows that LSs dramatically enhance the lifetime of flying radio access networks while only moderately affecting the throughput performance. In IoT data- harvesting settings, LSs substantially increase the total collected data payload for a given battery budget.