Joint Optimization of Power and Location in Full-Duplex UAV Enabled Systems

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used as aerial base stations (BSs) for future small cells. They can increase the spectral efficiency of the small cells due to their higher probability to have line-of-sight (LOS) connections and their mobility as a BS. In this article, in order to show the effectiveness of using full-duplex (FD) technology in UAV networks, we consider a UAV equipped with FD technology (FD-UAV) with imperfect self-interference cancelation as an aerial BS that serves both uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) users simultaneously in a small cell network. We aim to maximize DL sum-rate, whilst prescribing a certain quality of service for UL users, by optimizing the location of FD-UAV and available resources. The problem is nonconvex; so we propose an iterative method by exploiting the difference of convex functions programming to jointly optimize transmission power of users, FD-UAV location, and FD-UAV transmission power. Simulation results are illustrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed method for FD-UAV in comparison with ground BS, in both FD and half-duplex modes.