A Joint Blocklength and Location Optimization Scheme For UAV-Assisted Smart Port Communication

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT), there are more and more sensors in port. In this case, traditional wireless communication system using long data packets is unable to support this scenario when stringent requirement on latency and reliability is imposed. As a result, novel communication system supporting short packets transmission (SPT) is highly desirable. Taking smart port communication supporting SPT as research background, this paper considers using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a relay to assist the communication between receiver and sensors. Our goal is to jointly optimize the blocklength allocation for each link and the hover location of UAV to obtain the minimum decoding error probability. To overcome the non-convexity of the formulated problem, we propose an overall iterative algorithm (OIA) based on alternating direction method of multipliers. Simulation results show that the performance of the OIA is comparable to that of exhaustive search with lower complexity.