Operation Optimization of Laser-Powered Aerial Data Harvesting for Passive IoT Networks

This paper investigates the maximization of har-vested data in a laser-powered uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) supporting Internet of Things (IoT) deployment. The system enables battery-free IoT devices to establish communication links with the UAV via bistatic backscattering with the aid of a power beacon source. 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 mixed convex/concave positive functions. Finally, the simulations conducted show that the proposed algorithm provides 90% increase in collected data under different operation conditions.