Joint Optimization for Energy Efficiency in UAV-Enabled Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were originally designed for military and surveillance applications but are now significant in smart agriculture, wireless communication, and product delivery. In contrast to an Internet Service Provider (ISP), which typically relies on fixed base stations, which can fail in the event of a disaster, UAVs offer more stable alternatives. Because IoT devices, sensors, and ground users have limited processing power and battery life, there is a need for energy-efficient solutions. Meanwhile, users still expect high data rates. UAV-based wireless networks can meet these needs, even in harsh or disaster-hit areas. Current research focuses on improving energy efficiency and data transmission by optimizing UAV flight paths and scheduling. In this work, we tackle these issues by formulating a mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem that jointly considers device scheduling and UAV trajectory. We further decompose it into the following two parts: energy-efficient scheduling among ground users (P2) and the trajectory optimization of UAVs (P3). To address these issues, we develop a linear programming relaxation approach, a Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Programming (QCQP)-based Successive Convex Approximation (SCA) scheme, and the Block Coordinate Descent (BCD) algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state of the art in both power consumption and transmission rate.