Joint Trajectory and Communication Design for IRS-Assisted UAV Networks

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology for future communication systems because of its ability to intelligently configure the wireless environment. In this letter, an IRS is equipped on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a passive relay system, in which the UAV serves as a flexible airborne platform. Our aim is to maximize the minimum average transmission rate by jointly optimizing the communication scheduling, phase shift of the IRS, and trajectory of the UAV. The coupling of the optimization variables and non-convexity make this problem hard to solve directly. Therefore, we divide the problem into three subproblems and apply the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique to solve this problem iteratively. Numerical results demonstrate that the minimum transmission rate can be greatly improved by adopting the proposed iterative algorithm, and also confirm the effectiveness of the algorithm.