UAV-Enabled Wireless Power Transfer with Directional Antenna: A Two-User Case

This paper considers an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless power transfer (WPT) system, in which a UAV equipped with a directional antenna is dispatched to deliver wireless energy to charge two energy receivers (ERs) on the ground. Under this setup, we maximize the common (or minimum) energy received by the two ERs over a particular finite charging period, by jointly optimizing the altitude, trajectory, and transmit beamwidth of the UAV, subject to the UAV's maximum speed constraints, as well as the maximum/minimum altitude and beamwidth constraints. However, the common energy maximization is a non-convex optimization problem that is generally difficult to be solved optimally. To tackle this problem, we first ignore the maximum UAV speed constraints and solve the relaxed problem optimally. The optimal solution to the relaxed problem reveals that the UAV should hover above two symmetric locations during the whole charging period, with the corresponding altitude and beamwidth optimized. Next, we study the original problem with the maximum UAV speed constraints considered, for which a heuristic hover-fly-hover trajectory design is proposed based on the optimal symmetric-location-hovering solution to the relaxed problem. Numerical results validate that thanks to the employment of directional antenna with adaptive beamwidth and altitude control, our proposed design significantly improves the common energy received by the two ERs, as compared to other benchmark schemes.