Aiding a Disaster Spot via Multi-UAV-Based IoT Networks: Energy and Mission Completion Time-Aware Trajectory Optimization

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are one of the effective means to provide emergency communication services in post-disaster areas. In this article, we consider data dissemination in post-disaster areas, where all Internet of Things (IoT) nodes may not have data needs all the time. The energy consumption in data dissemination is one of the key metrics to pay attention to since the charging facilities for UAVs may be limited due to the destruction of existing infrastructure. In addition, UAVs have limited endurance or lifetime, so unnecessarily flying over IoT nodes that may not have data is time consuming. Therefore, given the energy budget and data requirements of the IoT nodes, we formulated a data dissemination problem using multiple UAVs in a post-disaster area while optimizing their trajectory, mission completion time, and energy consumption. After time discretization, the formulated problem is a mixed-integer nonconvex problem and thus difficult to solve in general. For this reason, we jointly use the bisection search technique and the block coordinate descent (BCD) method to solve the entire problem while aiming to optimize the trajectory and mission completion time of the considered UAV as well as the overall energy consumption. In each iteration of the BCD method, we solve the user association, trajectory optimization, and power optimization subproblems one after the other in an alternating fashion. To solve each subproblem, we employ the geometric programming (GP)-based optimization technique that transforms the variables and constraints. Regarding the initial trajectory of the UAV, we utilized dynamic programming techniques based on unsaturated data requirements of IoT nodes. We performed extensive simulations in many realistic environments to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed data dissemination scheme in post-disaster scenarios.