UAV-Assisted Cooperative Communications With Time-Sharing Information and Power Transfer

In this paper, we focus on a UAV-assisted cooperative communication system based on simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), where the UAV serves as a relay and its transmission capability is partly powered by radio signal from the source via the time-sharing mechanism. We study the end-to-end cooperative throughput maximization problem by optimizing the UAV's decision profile, power profile and trajectory for both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols. The problem is decomposed into three optimization subproblems for decision profile, power profile and trajectory, and solved through alternating optimization, by which each of the subproblems is solved with the other two fixed. A binarization algorithm is further proposed to make the decision profile feasible. We show that the proposed solution outperforms not only two SWIPT-based strategies, but also a similar solution from an existing work without consideration for SWIPT. In addition, results indicate that the proposed algorithm performs efficiently in both optimality and convergence.