Towards Energy-Efficient Data Collection by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Base Station With NOMA for Emergency Communications in IoT

For emergency communications in an internet of thing (IoT) network, a large number of gateways are distributed to gather the data traffic. Considering the practical difficulty of deploying multiple territorial base stations (TBSs) in a wide range, unmanned aerial vehicle base station (UAV-BS) can fly to a specific point and hover above there to collect data traffic from gateways. In this paper, we aim to maximize the UAV-BS energy efficiency under the constraints of total serving delay, UAV-BS flying speed, and the maximum available transmitting power of gateways, etc. Firstly, we propose a distributed gateway cluster (GC) algorithm to group gateways into multiple GCs based on the distances among gateways. Next, the UAV-BS flies and hovers above each GC, where the gateways in the GC simultaneously transmit data to the UAV-BS by non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). By analyzing the NOMA feature, we propose theorems optimizing the UAV-BS hovering height to minimize the transmitting power of the gateway with the maximum transmitting power among the gateways in a GC. Based on the proposed theorems, we formulate the joint optimization problem to maximize the UAV-BS energy efficiency with only the variables of UAV-BS flying speed and the serving time for each GC. The optimization problem is effectively solved by the geometric programming (GP) method. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms by extensive simulation results.