A New Store-Then-Amplify-and-Forward Protocol for UAV Mobile Relaying

In this letter, we consider the use of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a mobile relay to assist the communication between two ground users without a direct link. We propose a novel store-then-amplify-and-forward (SAF) relaying protocol for the UAV to exploit its mobility jointly with the low-complexity AF relaying. Specifically, the received signal from the source is first stored in a buffer at the UAV, then amplified and forwarded to the destination when the UAV flies closer to the destination. With this new SAF protocol, we aim to maximize the throughput of the UAV-enabled relaying system by jointly optimizing the source/UAV transmit power and the UAV trajectory, as well as the time-slot pairing for each data packet received and forwarded by the UAV. As this problem is a non-convex mixed integer optimization problem that is difficult to solve, we propose an efficient algorithm for obtaining a suboptimal solution for it by applying the techniques of Hungary algorithm, alternating optimization and successive convex approximation. Numerical results show that the proposed mobile SAF relaying outperforms the conventional AF relaying without signal storing.