Trajectory Design and Resource Allocation for Multi-UAV Communications Under Blockage-Aware Channel Model

This paper considers an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted communication system for data collection in urban areas, where multiple UAVs are dispatched to harvest data from multiple ground user equipments (UEs). We adopt a blockage-aware channel model to characterize the practical blockage effects for air-to-ground (A2G) links caused by buildings. Aiming to minimize the mission completion time while satisfying the data collection requirements of UEs, we formulate a problem by jointly optimizing the UAV three-dimensional (3-D) trajectory and resource allocation, including the UE scheduling and subcarrier assignment. To solve the formulated non-convex combinatorial programming problem, we propose a suboptimal algorithm that solves two subproblems iteratively. Specifically, in each iteration, the trajectory design subproblem jointly optimizes the UAVs’ waypoints and time slot length to decrease the mission completion time, which is solved by employing block successive convex approximation (BSCA). For the resource allocation subproblem, we develop a heuristic algorithm for UE scheduling and subcarrier assignment to increase the collected data volume for a given time duration. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of mission completion time compared to benchmark schemes.