Joint Optimization on Trajectory, Transmission and Time for Effective Data Acquisition in UAV-Enabled IoT

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) energy consumption and task completion time are two significant aspects in UAV-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) data acquisition. However, while energy consumption and task completion time are not conflicting constraints, optimizing the former often does not automatically lead to optimization of the latter, and vice-versa. In this paper, we aim to further decrease UAV energy consumption while minimizing UAV task completion time. We propose a novel UAV utility function to describe task completion time for data acquisition and energy consumption for propulsion and receiver's circuits. Then, we formulate a mixed-integer nonconvex utility maximization problem, involving joint optimization of UAV trajectory, velocity, acceleration, task completion time and scheduling of IoT devices for data uploading. To tackle this problem, we decompose the original problem into two sub-problems and propose a two-layer joint task time and trajectory optimization (JTTTO) iterative algorithm, which converges in polynomial time. Accordingly, we apply block coordinate descent (BCD) and successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithms to optimize UAV trajectory, and bisection search algorithm to minimize task completion time, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed data acquisition scheme significantly decreases the UAV's energy consumption while minimizing task completion time, compared with the other time-minimization schemes.