UAV-enabled multiuser wireless power transfer: Trajectory design and energy optimization

This paper investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled multiuser wireless power transfer (WPT) system, where a UAV-mounted energy transmitter (ET) is dispatched to broadcast wireless energy to charge multiple energy receivers (ERs) on the ground. To ensure efficient and fair WPT, we maximize the minimum of the energy harvested by all ERs during a given charging period, by optimizing the UAV's trajectory subject to its maximum speed constraints. Such a min-energy maximization problem, however, is non-convex, and thus is challenging to be directly solved. To tackle this problem, we first consider an ideal case by ignoring the UAV's maximum speed constraint, and show that the relaxed problem can be optimally solved via the Lagrange dual method. The obtained trajectory solution implies that the UAV should hover over a set of fixed locations with optimal allocation of the hovering time among them. Then, for the general case with the UAV's maximum speed constraint considered, we propose a new successive hover-and-fly trajectory motivated by the optimal trajectory in the ideal case, and obtain efficient trajectory designs by applying the successive convex programing (SCP) optimization technique. Numerical results show that our proposed trajectory designs significantly improve the min-energy transferred to all ERs, as compared to other benchmark schemes.