AETD: An application-aware, energy-efficient trajectory design for flying base stations

Recent developments in consumer Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technology have created unprecedented opportunities for their applications in various civil domains. These ubiquitous vehicles of different shapes and sizes with easy and user-friendly configurations are favorite choices for providing different services such as wireless communications, emergency medical deliveries, disaster handling and many more. However, the limited battery life of UAVs pose a challenge to their service continuity, thus mechanisms to extend the UAVs’ battery life are required. For service delivery, UAVs consume energy for mechanical functionalities as well as for communicating with other network nodes. To reduce the mechanical energy consumption, the shortest flying path can be considered while selecting a right radio frequency level for UAV’s communications can effectively reduce the remaining required energy. In this paper, we analyze energy requirements for providing different communication services using different radio frequency bands. We propose an application-aware, energy-efficient trajectory design method which dynamically adapts the UAV’s communication radio frequency to the requested services in the best flying trajectory while considering service level priorities as well. Our simulation results show that our approach can save up to 14% energy while providing even higher Quality of Service (QoS) in a given trajectory.