Teng Joon Lim

Wireless communication systems that include unmanned aerial vehicles promise to provide cost-effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms, on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly reconfigured, and likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energy-constrained UAVs for wireless communications also introduces many new challenges. In this article, we provide an overview of UAV-aided wireless communications, by introducing the basic networking architecture and main channel characteristics, highlighting the key design considerations as well as the new opportunities to be exploited.

In this paper, we consider a novel mobile relaying technique, where the relay nodes are mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and hence are capable of moving at high speed. Compared with conventional static relaying, mobile relaying offers a new degree of freedom for performance enhancement via careful relay trajectory design. We study the throughput maximization problem in mobile relaying systems by optimizing the source/relay transmit power along with the relay trajectory, subject to practical mobility constraints (on the UAV's speed and initial/final relay locations), as well as the information-causality constraint at the relay. It is shown that for the fixed relay trajectory, the throughput-optimal source/relay power allocations over time follow a “staircase” water filling structure, with non-increasing and non-decreasing water levels at the source and relay, respectively. On the other hand, with given power allocations, the throughput can be further improved by optimizing the UAV's trajectory via successive convex optimization. An iterative algorithm is thus proposed to optimize the power allocations and relay trajectory alternately. Furthermore, for the special case with free initial and final relay locations, the jointly optimal power allocation and relay trajectory are derived. Numerical results show that by optimizing the trajectory of the relay and power allocations adaptive to its induced channel variation, mobile relaying is able to achieve significant throughput gains over the conventional static relaying.

In terrestrial communication networks without fixed infrastructure, unmanned aerial vehicle-mounted mobile base stations (MBSs) provide an efficient solution to achieve wireless connectivity. This letter aims to minimize the number of MBSs needed to provide wireless coverage for a group of distributed ground terminals (GTs), ensuring that each GT is within the communication range of at least one MBS. We propose a polynomial-time algorithm with successive MBS placement, where the MBSs are placed sequentially starting on the area perimeter of the uncovered GTs along a spiral path toward the center, until all GTs are covered. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably compared with other schemes in terms of the number of required MBSs as well as time complexity.

We consider an Amplify-and-Forward cooperative diversity system where a source node communicates with a destination node with the help of one or more relay nodes. The conventional system model assumes all relay nodes participate, with the available channel and power resources equally distributed over all nodes. This approach being clearly sub-optimal, we first present two power allocation schemes to minimize the system outage probability, based on complete channel state information and channel statistics, respectively. We further show that the proposed optimal power allocation methods minimize system symbol error rate as well. Next, we propose a selection scheme where only one “best ” relay node is chosen to assist in the transmission. We show that the selection-AF scheme maintains full diversity order, and at reasonable power levels has significantly better outage behavior and average throughput than the conventional all-participate scheme or that with optimal power allocation. Finally we combine power allocation and selection to further improve performance.

We consider an amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative diversity system where a source communicates with a destination with the help of multiple relay nodes. The conventional system assumes all relay nodes participate, with the available channel and power resources equally distributed over all nodes. This approach being clearly sub-optimal, we first present an optimal power allocation scheme to minimize the outage probability for an AF system. Next, we propose a new selection scheme where only one, the "best" relay node is chosen to participate in the transmission. We show that at reasonable power levels the selection AF scheme maintains full diversity order, and has significantly better outage behavior and average throughput than the conventional scheme or that with optimal power allocation