Multi-UAV Assisted Maritime Communication Scheduling Strategy

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can provide flexi-ble on-demand services for maritime communications while the vessels sail away from the terrestrial base stations. Considering the mobility of both the multiple UAVs and users, this paper presents an effective maritime communication scheduling strategy, which maximizes the sum rate by jointly optimizing the trajectory and the transmission power. To optimize trajectory overlapping, we particularly adopt the Fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm to cluster the UAVs. We address the original non-convex scheduling problem into three solvable sub-problems with successive convex approximation scheme. Furthermore, we present a joint alternative optimization to obtain the optimal trajectories and transmission power of all UAVs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can provide effective communication for users in terms of transmission rate.