UAV-Enabled Wireless Power Transfer: Trajectory Design and Energy Optimization

This paper studies a new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled wireless power transfer (WPT) system, where a UAV-mounted mobile energy transmitter (ET) is dispatched to deliver wireless energy to a set of on-ground energy receivers (ERs). We investigate how the UAV should optimally exploit its mobility via trajectory design to maximize the energy transferred to all ERs during a finite period. First, we consider the maximization of the sum energy received by all ERs by optimizing the UAV's trajectory subject to its maximum speed constraint. We obtain its optimal solution, which shows that the UAV should hover at one single fixed location during the whole period. However, the sum-energy maximization incurs a "near-far" fairness issue. To overcome this issue, we consider a different problem to maximize the minimum received energy among all ERs. 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. 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).