Flight Time Minimization via UAV’s Trajectory Design for Ground Sensor Data Collection

This paper considers the joint design of UAV trajectory and wireless resource allocation for UAV-aided data collection from widely deployed ground sensors. The objective is to minimize the mission completion time for collecting all data packets from the ground sensors, which are subject to the energy available for wireless uploading. The flight time is discretized into time intervals with equal duration, and all sensors share the same frequency band or time interval. We consider two orthogonal multiple access schemes, i.e., time division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency division multiple access (FDMA). The joint design is formulated as a nonconvex mixed-integer programming on the trajectory, power and time/frequency allocation. A successive convex approximation (SCA) based bisection search algorithm is proposed to yield a suboptimal and efficient solution. Numerical results illustrate the tradeoff between the mission completion time and mission requirements of sensors.