Power Efficient Visible Light Communication (VLC) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

A novel approach that combines visible light communication (VLC) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to simultaneously provide flexible communication and illumination is proposed. To minimize the power consumption, the locations of UAVs and the cell associations are optimized under illumination and communication constraints. An efficient sub-optimal solution that divides the original problem into two sub-problems is proposed. The first sub-problem is modeled as a classical smallest enclosing disk problem to obtain the optimal locations of UAVs, given the cell association. Then, assuming fixed UAV locations, the second sub-problem is modeled as a min-size clustering problem to obtain the optimized cell association. In addition, the obtained UAV locations and cell associations are iteratively optimized multiple times to reduce the power consumption. Numerical results show that the proposed approach can reduce the total transmit power consumption by at least 53.8% compared to two baseline algorithms with fixed UAV locations.