Throughput Improvement for Multi-Hop UAV Relaying

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relaying is one of the main technologies for UAV communications. It uses UAVs as relays in the sky to provide reliable wireless connection between remote users. In this paper, we consider a multi-hop UAV relaying system. To improve the spectrum efficiency of the system, we maximize the average end-to-end throughput from the source to the destination by jointly optimizing the bandwidth allocated to each hop, the transmit power for the source and relays, and the trajectories of the UAVs, subject to constraints on the total spectrum bandwidth, the average and peak transmit power, the UAV mobility and collision avoidance, and the information-causality of multi-hop relaying. The formulated optimization is non-convex. We propose an efficient algorithm to approximate and solve it, using the alternating optimization and successive convex optimization methods. Numerical results show that the proposed optimization significantly outperforms other benchmark schemes, verifying the effectiveness of our scheme.