Joint User Scheduling, Power Configuration and Trajectory Planning Strategy for UAV-Aided WSNs

The future sixth-generation (6G) communication system is promising to provide differentiated communication services for massive users worldwide. To achieve this goal, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), regarded as the critical component of the 6G system, will be widely deployed in large-scale non-urban areas such as mountain villages, forests, and oceans. To ensure the high efficiency and stability of WSNs without the support of ground facilities, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are dispatched to provide assistance for WSNs. Nevertheless, considering the limitations of both the mobility and communication capability of UAVs, the diversified communication demands pose huge challenges for UAV-aided WSNs in large-scale application scenarios, such as how to schedule the SNs served in each time slot, how to optimize their working parameters, and how to plan the UAV trajectory. Therefore, a joint user scheduling, power configuration, and trajectory planning strategy is proposed in this article, which is formulated as an optimization problem suffering from non-convexity and complication. The successive optimization scheme is adopted here to efficiently solve this problem, which divides the original problem into three sub-problems and solves them iteratively. The simulation results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed strategy.