URLLC Oriented Joint Power Control and Resource Allocation in UAV-assisted Networks

Recently, ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) has attracted a significant interest for mission-critical applications in future wireless communication systems. Achieving strict requirements of latency and reliability for URLLC with a fixed infrastructure is challenging, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been deemed as promising enablers to handle this issue due to its salient attributes, such as high maneuverability, flexible deployment, and high probability of line-of-sight links. This article investigates a novel UAV-assisted URLLC service system, where the blocklength of channel codes is finite in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. Considering the limited energy of IoT devices, the average uplink transmit power of the IoT devices are minimized by jointly optimizing the device scheduling and association, power control and resource allocation, as well as UAV deployment. The formulated problem is a mixed-integer nonconvex optimization problem because of the finite blocklength regime. To tackle the problem, we derive the approximation of the achievable rate and propose an effective iteration algorithm by applying the block coordinate descent (BCD) and Lagrange dual decomposition techniques. Furthermore, the convergence of our proposed algorithm is analyzed and illustrated. The minimum average transmit power of IoT devices is calculated with a different resource allocation scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed iterative algorithm can obtain a performance gain of 15%–20% in terms of the average transmit power for URLLC. Moreover, compared with the average bandwidth allocation scheme, our proposed algorithm can get a stable minimum as the total bandwidth increases.