Energy efficiency maximization for buffer-aided multi-UAV relaying communications

This paper studies a multiple unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)relaying communication system,where multiple UAV re-lays assist the blocked communication between a group of ground users(GUs)and a base station(BS).Since the UAVs only have limited-energy in practice,our design aims to maximize the energy efficiency(EE)through jointly designing the communica-tion scheduling,the transmit power allocation,as well as UAV trajectory under the buffer constraint over a given flight period.Actually,the formulated fractional optimization problem is diffi-cult to be solved in general because of non-convexity.To re-solve this difficulty,an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed based on the block coordinate descent(BCD)and successive convex approximation(SCA)techniques,as well as the Dinkel-bach’s algorithm.Specifically,the optimization variables of the formulated problem are divided into three blocks and we alter-nately optimize each block of the variables over iteration.Numeri-cal results verify the convergence of the proposed iterative al-gorithm and show that the proposed designs achieve significant EE gain,which outperform other benchmark schemes.