Designing unmanned aerial vehicle trajectories for energy minimization

A team of researchers at the University of Luxembourg and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology have recently proposed a new approach to design trajectories for energy-efficient unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless communications. Their paper, prepublished on arXiv, specifically focuses on cases in which an UAV acts as a flying base station (BS) to serve ground users (GSs) within some predetermined latency constraints. "Our goal is to design the UAV trajectory to minimize the total energy consumption while satisfying the RT requirement and energy budget, which is accomplished via jointly optimizing the trajectory and UAV's velocities along subsequent hops," the researchers wrote in their paper. Optimizing a UAV's trajectory and its velocities together can be somewhat difficult to achieve. To do so, the researchers developed an approach that carries out two consecutive steps. Their approach entails the use of two distinct algorithms, a heuristic search and a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm.