UAV-Aided MIMO Communications for 5G Internet of Things

Abstract

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a promising enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, due to its agile maneuverability. In this paper, we explore the potential gain of UAV-aided data collection in a generalized IoT scenario. Particularly, a composite channel model, including both large-scale and small-scale fading is used to depict typical propagation environments. Moreover, rigorous energy constraints are considered to characterize IoT devices as practically as possible. A multiantenna UAV is employed, which can communicate with a cluster of single-antenna IoT devices to form a virtual MIMO link. We formulate a whole-trajectory-oriented optimization problem, where the transmission duration and the transmit power of all devices are jointly designed to maximize the data collection efficiency for the whole flight. Different from previous studies, only the slowly varying large-scale channel state information is assumed available, to coincide with the fact that practically it is quite difficult to predictively acquire the random small-scale channel fading prior to the UAV flight. We propose an iterative scheme to overcome the nonconvexity of the formulated problem. The presented scheme can provide a significant performance gain over traditional schemes and converges quickly.