Aerial Data Transmission Under Disasters: Multi-Hop Network Exploiting UAV-Enabled Virtual Antenna Arrays

Bingtian Lit, Hui Kang, Geng Sun, Jiahui Li, Xinyu Bao, Bo Zhu

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing an increasingly important role in wireless network communications applied to disaster rescue with wireless communication technology. However, due to shortcomings such as low on-board energy and limited transmit power, they are unable to achieve high performance transmission. In this work, to improve the transmission performance, UAVs can form a virtual antenna array (VAA) and transmit information to other UAV arrays or base stations (BSs) by using collaborative beamforming techniques (CB). We formulate the transmission rate maximization and energy minimization communication multi-objective optimization problem (REMCMOP) for wireless networks to jointly maximize the total transmission rates, maximize the minimum transmission rate in all UAV arrays and minimize the total motion energy consumptions of UAVs. Therefore, an improved multi-objective Gray Wolf algorithm (MOGWO-CCH) is put forward to solve the problem. Finally, by comparing the simulation results, it is verified that MOGWO-CCH performs better than other comparative methods in dealing with the formulated REMCMOP.