Beamforming for UAV Communications Under Battery Life Constraint

Abstract

In this paper, beamforming method for multiple-unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) communications is proposed by jointly considering the data rate and battery life time of each UAV. Considering a practical power consumption model, where the decoding power at each UAV is a nonlinear function of the data rate, the power consumption of each drone is modeled to expect the battery life time. Using a bisection search algorithm, we solve a non-convex optimization problem to maximize the minimum of drone throughputs during the expected battery life time. Numerical results verify that the proposed beamforming scheme can significantly improve the expected data throughput of the multiple-UAV systems.