Energy-efficient data collection for UAV-assisted IoT: Joint trajectory and resource optimization

Internet of Things (IoT) can be conveniently deployed while empowering various applications, where the IoT nodes can form clusters to finish certain missions collectively. As energy-efficient operations are critical to prolong the lifetime of the energy-constrained IoT devices, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can be dispatched to geographically approach the IoT clusters towards energy-efficient IoT transmissions. This paper intends to maximize the system energy efficiency by considering both the IoT transmission energy and UAV propulsion energy, where the UAV trajectory and IoT communication resources are jointly optimized. By applying large-system analysis and Dinkelbach method, the original fractional optimization is approximated and reformulated in the form of subtraction, and further a block coordinate descent framework is employed to update the UAV trajectory and IoT communication resources iteratively. Extensive simulation results are provided to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method.