Cellular Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks With Sense-and-Send Protocol

In this paper, we consider a cellular controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network in which multiple UAVs cooperatively complete each sensing task. We first propose a sense-and-send protocol where the UAVs collect sensory data of the tasks and transmit the collected data to the base station. We then formulate a joint trajectory, sensing location, and UAV scheduling optimization problem that minimizes the completion time for all the sensing tasks in the network. To solve this NP-hard problem efficiently, we decouple it into three subproblems: 1) trajectory optimization; 2) sensing location optimization; and 3) UAV scheduling. An iterative trajectory, sensing, and scheduling optimization (ITSSO) algorithm is proposed to solve these subproblems jointly. The convergence and complexity of the ITSSO algorithm, together with the system performance are analyzed. Simulation results show that the proposed ITSSO algorithm saves the task completion time by 15% compared to the noncooperative scheme.