Energy and Age Pareto Optimal Trajectories in UAV-Assisted Wireless Data Collection

This paper studiesan unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless network, where a UAV is dispatched to gather information from ground sensor nodes (SN) and transfer the collected data to a depot. The information freshness is captured by the age of information (AoI) metric, whilst the energy consumption of the UAV is seen as another performance criterion. Most importantly, the AoI and energy efficiency are inherently competing metrics, since decreasing the AoI requires the UAV returning to the depot more frequently, leading to a higher energy consumption. To this end, we design UAV paths that optimize these two competing metrics jointly and reveal the Pareto frontier. To formulate this problem, a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is proposed with a flow-based constraint set and we apply Bender’s decomposition on the proposed formulation. Numerical results show that the proposed method allows deriving non-dominated solutions among two competing metrics when designing the UAV path.