UAV-assisted Cooperative Communications with Power-splitting Information and Power Transfer

In this paper, we focus on a UAV-assisted cooperative communication system with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), where the UAV serves as a mobile relay and is powered by radio signal from the source via power-splitting mechanism. We study the end-to-end cooperative throughput maximization problem by optimizing the UAV’s power profile, power-splitting ratio profile and trajectory for both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols. The problem is decomposed into two subproblems: profile optimization and trajectory optimization. The former one is solved via dual decomposition and the latter one is solved via successive convex optimization. Then the cooperative throughput is optimized by alternately solving the two subproblems. Simulation results show that with the proposed optimal solution, choice for the UAV’s power profile and power-splitting ratio profile is more long-sighted than two greedy strategies and successive optimization for trajectory design can converge in a few rounds of iteration. The proposed optimal solution outperforms not only mobile and static greedy strategies, but also a similar solution from an existing work without consideration of SWIPT with performance gain up to 30%. Moreover, w