Energy-Optimized Path Planning for Moving Aerial Base Stations: A Non User-Oriented Framework

Utilization of moving aerial base stations (ABSs) has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Accordingly, path planning to optimize a given utility function, and in particular, mechanical energy, has been the subject of many investigations. Most of the works in this area are user-oriented, i.e., the path planning is implemented for a given user location. In this letter, we propose a non user-oriented path planning scheme, based on a family of spiral shaped curves, that is efficient in terms of energy and can provide a fairly uniform coverage for all users within a cell. We show that the proposed spiral curves will result in considerable amount of saving in mechanical power consumption compared to the radial paths already proposed in the literature. We also compare the proposed framework to an existing user-oriented path planning scheme, proposed by R. Zhang
et al.
, in terms of coverage and energy-efficiency.