Laser-Empowered UAVs for Aerial Data Aggregation in Passive IoT Networks

This paper investigates the maximization of data harvested by an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) that supports Internet of Things (IoT) deployment scenarios. The novelty of the paper is that we study the feasibility of battery-free UAV and IoT device deployment where the UAV is powered by a ground laser source, and the IoT devices are powered by a power beacon via bistatic backscattering. We aim to optimize the UAV trajectory while minimizing the laser energy consumption throughout the entire flight by tuning the laser power and the power beacon radiated temporal power profiles. Upon considering an unspecified flying time, we adopt path discretization and resort to the single-block successive convex approximation (SCA) to solve the data collection maximization problem. In addition to considering the UAV dynamics and power budget, two novel SCA-compatible bounds are introduced for the product of positive mixed convex/concave functions. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm increases the data collected under different operation conditions by approximately 90%.