Efficiency Maximization for UAV-Enabled Mobile Relaying Systems with Laser Charging

This work studies the joint problem of power and trajectory optimization in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled mobile relaying system. In the considered system, in order to provide convenient and sustainable energy supply to the UAV relay, we consider the deployment of a power beacon (PB) which can wirelessly charge the UAV and it is realized by a properly designed laser charging system. To this end, we propose an efficiency (the weighted sum of the energy efficiency during information transmission and wireless power transmission efficiency) maximization problem by optimizing the source/UAV/PB transmit powers along with the UAV's trajectory. This optimization problem is also subject to practical mobility constraints, as well as the information-causality constraint and energy-causality constraint at the UAV. Different from the commonly used alternating optimization (AO) algorithm, two joint design algorithms, namely: the concave-convex procedure (CCCP) and penalty dual decomposition (PDD)-based algorithms, are presented to address the resulting non-convex problem, which features complex objective function with multiple-ratio terms and coupling constraints. These two very different algorithms are both able to achieve a stationary solution of the original efficiency maximization problem. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.