English

3D Multi-Drone-Cell Trajectory Design for Efficient IoT Data Collection

Networking and Internet Architecture 2019-07-30 v1 Signal Processing

Abstract

Drone cell (DC) is an emerging technique to offer flexible and cost-effective wireless connections to collect Internet-of-things (IoT) data in uncovered areas of terrestrial networks. The flying trajectory of DC significantly impacts the data collection performance. However, designing the trajectory is a challenging issue due to the complicated 3D mobility of DC, unique DC-to-ground (D2G) channel features, limited DC-to-BS (D2B) backhaul link quality, etc. In this paper, we propose a 3D DC trajectory design for the DC-assisted IoT data collection where multiple DCs periodically fly over IoT devices and relay the IoT data to the base stations (BSs). The trajectory design is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem to minimize the average user-to-DC (U2D) pathloss, considering the state-of-the-art practical D2G channel model. We decouple the MINLP problem into multiple quasi-convex or integer linear programming (ILP) sub-problems, which optimizes the user association, user scheduling, horizontal trajectories and DC flying altitudes of DCs, respectively. Then, a 3D multi-DC trajectory design algorithm is developed to solve the MINLP problem, in which the sub-problems are optimized iteratively through the block coordinate descent (BCD) method. Compared with the static DC deployment, the proposed trajectory design can lower the average U2D pathloss by 10-15 dB, and reduce the standard deviation of U2D pathloss by 56%, which indicates the improvements in both link quality and user fairness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.00776,
  title  = {3D Multi-Drone-Cell Trajectory Design for Efficient IoT Data Collection},
  author = {Weisen Shi and Junling Li and Nan Cheng and Feng Lyu and Yanpeng Dai and Haibo Zhou and Xuemin and Shen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.00776},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted by IEEE ICC'19

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:38:52.858Z