Energy Consumption Models for UAV Communications: A Brief Survey

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in wireless communications. However, limited by on-board energy, to achieve a full potential of UAV is a challenge. As a result, accurate energy consumption models (ECMs) are important for UAV-enabled wireless communications. In this paper, a brief survey of UAV ECMs has been provided. To make it easy to understand, we first introduce the fundamentals of UAV. Next, we classify and sort out the typical ECMs in the past five years. Finally, we discuss some possible applications where UAV energy consumption needs to be considered, and envision possible future research directions.