UAV Relay-Assisted Emergency Communications in IoT Networks: Resource Allocation and Trajectory Optimization

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication hasemerged as a prominent technology for emergency communi-cations (e.g., natural disaster) in the Internet of Things (IoT)networks to enhance the ability of disaster prediction, damageassessment, and rescue operations promptly. A UAV can bedeployed as a flying base station (BS) to collect data from time-constrained IoT devices and then transfer it to a ground gateway(GW). In general, the latency constraint at IoT devices and UAV’slimited storage capacity highly hinder practical applicationsof UAV-assisted IoT networks. In this paper, full-duplex (FD)radio is adopted at the UAV to overcome these challenges. Inaddition, half-duplex (HD) scheme for UAV-based relaying isalso considered to provide a comparative study between twomodes (viz., FD and HD). Herein, a device is considered tobe successfully served iff its data is collected by the UAV andconveyed to GW timely during flight time. In this context,we aim to maximize the number of served IoT devices byjointly optimizing bandwidth, power allocation, and the UAVtrajectory while satisfying each device’s requirement and theUAV’s limited storage capacity. The formulated optimizationproblem is troublesome to solve due to its non-convexity andcombinatorial nature. Towards appealing applications, we firstrelax binary variables into continuous ones and transform theoriginal problem into a more computationally tractable form.By leveraging inner approximation framework, we derive newlyapproximated functions for non-convex parts and then develop asimple yet efficient iterative algorithm for its solutions. Next,we attempt to maximize the total throughput subject to thenumber of served IoT devices. Finally, numerical results showthat the proposed algorithms significantly outperform benchmarkapproaches in terms of the number of served IoT devices andsystem throughput.