Energy Consumption Minimizing Through an Efficient UAV Trajectory in Maritime Communications

In this paper, we propose a maritime unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight trajectory strategy which minimizes the energy consumption while guaranteeing the Quality of Service (QoS) for vessel users. In particular, a realistic flying model for the UAV with acceleration and deceleration stages during the entire flight is considered. To ensure communication coverage and maintain the QoS for each vessel user, a flying-hovering scheme with a QoS-ensured hovering points (QHP) algorithm is presented. Furthermore, the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique is employed to minimize the sum energy consumption concerning the non-uniform velocity trajectory for the UAV. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed joint optimization strategy effectively reduces the system energy consumption while ensuring the quality of service for vessel users.