Joint 3-D Positioning and Power Allocation for UAV Relay Aided by Geographic Information

In this paper, we study to employ geographic information to address the blockage problem of air-to-ground links between UAV and terrestrial nodes. In particular, a UAV relay is deployed to establish communication links from a ground base station to multiple ground users. To improve communication capacity, we first model the blockage effect caused by buildings according to the three-dimensional (3-D) geographic information. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum capacity among users by jointly optimizing the 3-D position and power allocation of the UAV relay, under the constraints of link capacity, maximum transmit power, and blockage. To solve this complex non-convex problem, a two-loop optimization framework is developed based on Lagrangian relaxation. The outer-loop aims to obtain proper Lagrangian multipliers to ensure the solution of the Lagrangian problem converge to the tightest upper bound on the original problem. The inner-loop solves the Lagrangian problem by applying the block coordinate descent (BCD) and successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques, where UAV 3-D positioning and power allocation are alternately optimized in each iteration. Simulation results confirm that the proposed solution significantly outperforms three benchmark schemes and achieves a performance close to the upper bound on the UAV relay system.