Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces Assisted UAV Reliable Communication

In this paper, we investigate the reliability of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications in the case of limited UAV energy. Under constraints of the UAV energy and the channel decoding error rate, we formulate a reliability maximization problem by jointly optimizing the IRS’s scheduling, the UAV’s trajectory, the IRS’s phase shift, and the UAV’s transmit power. Since the partial constraints of the problem are strictly nonconvex and its variables are coupling, the problem is difficult to convert to a nonconvex problem. Therefore, we propose a chaotic adaptation hybrid whale optimization algorithm (CAHWOA) to solve the problem. CAHWOA is implemented by using alternately the chaotic adaptation whale optimization algorithm (CAWOA) and the binary optimization algorithm (BWOA). Simulation results demonstrate that the joint optimization of IRS and UAV can improve the system communication reliability by almost 32% compared with the two baseline schemes. CAHWOA can improve the convergence rate by nearly 20% and enhance the optimization-seeking accuracy by about 0.04 compared with the three baseline algorithms.