Transmission power and altitude design for energy-efficient mission completion of small-size unmanned aerial vehicle

Abstract

Owing to the rapid and facile deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the third-generation partnership programme has recently shown considerable interest in UAVs for assisting current terrestrial base stations. Hence, the feasibility of using UAVs has been vigorously investigated for enhancing the performance of traditional ground-based communications, e.g. coverage and quality-of-service enhancement under natural disaster or overwhelming data requirement conditions. Here, however, the energy-efficient operation of the UAV is necessary to obtain the essential benefits. To strengthen the base of operation and management of UAVs in cellular systems, the authors consider in this Letter a single mission in which a small-size UAV transmits a given data volume to a cell boundary user. They design the transmit power and altitude of the UAV to complete the mission with high-energy efficiency. From the numerical results, it is verified that the UAV transmitting data with the designed transmit power at the designed altitude can complete the mission with near-optimal, i.e. maximum, energy efficiency.