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Energy-efficient UAV-NOMA aided wireless coverage with massive connections

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless coverage scheme, wherein UAVs help to serve the cell-edge users for ground base stations based on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). The combined benefits of wide coverage and massive connections enable UAV-NOMA-aided wireless coverage to effectively meet the requirements of the Internet of Everything. Meanwhile, energy efficiency (EE) is maximized via resource allocation to address the issue of the power supply bottleneck of UAVs. The non-convex optimization problem is transformed into two convex subproblems of trajectory optimization and power allocation, and an iterative alternating optimization algorithm is proposed to address it effectively. Moreover, we further considered the energy consumption of the ground base stations, effectively minimizing it by optimizing precoding while guaranteeing average throughput. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed UAV-aided wireless coverage scheme and demonstrate the EE improvement.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2020YFB1807002) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62271099).

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Correspondence to Nan Zhao.

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Tong, Y., Sheng, M., Liu, J. et al. Energy-efficient UAV-NOMA aided wireless coverage with massive connections. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 66, 222303 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-023-3821-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-023-3821-3

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