Multi-UAV Interference Coordination via Joint Trajectory and Power Control

In this paper, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle-enabled interference channel (UAV-IC), where each of the $K$ UAVs communicates with its associated ground terminals (GTs) at the same time and over the same spectrum. To exploit the new degree of freedom of UAV mobility for interference coordination between the UAV-GT links, we formulate a joint trajectory and power control (TPC) problem for maximizing the aggregate sum rate of the UAV-IC for a given flight interval, under the practical constraints on the UAV flying speed, altitude, as well as collision avoidance. These constraints couple the TPC variables across different time slots and UAVs, leading to a challenging large-scale and non-convex optimization problem. By exploiting the problem structure, we show that the optimal TPC solution follows the fly-hover-fly strategy, based on which the problem can be handled by firstly finding an optimal hovering locations followed by solving a dimension-reduced TPC problem with given initial and hovering locations of UAVs. For the reduced TPC problem, we propose a successive convex approximation algorithm. To improve the computational efficiency, we further develop a parallel TPC algorithm that is effciently implementable over multi-core CPUs. We also propose a {segment-by-segment method} %virtual waypoint model which decomposes the TPC problem into sequential TPC subproblems each with a smaller problem dimension. Simulation results demonstrate the superior computation time efficiency of the proposed algorithms, and also show that the UAV-IC can yield higher network sum rate than the benchmark orthogonal schemes.