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Buffer-Aware Scheduling for UAV Relay Networks with Energy Fairness
Ref: CISTER-TR-200202       Publication Date: 25 to 28, May, 2020

Abstract:
For assisting data communications in humanunfriendly environments, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are employed to relay data for ground sensors thanks to UAVs’ flexible deployment, high mobility, and line-of-sight communications. In UAV relay networks, energy efficient data relay is critical due to limited battery of the ground sensing devices. In this paper, we propose a buffer-aware transmission scheduling optimization to minimize the energy consumption of the ground devices under constraints of buffer overflows and energy cost fairness on the ground devices. Moreover, we show that the problem is NP-complete and propose a heuristic algorithm to approximate the optimal scheduling solution in polynomial time. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in terms of network sizes, packet arrival rates, and fairness of the energy consumption. Numerical results confirm that the proposed scheduling algorithm reduces the energy consumption of the ground devices in a fair fashion, while the buffer overflow constraint holds.

Yousef Emami

,

Kai Li

,

Eduardo Tovar